Day 258 – Patience vs. Persistence

You need to have a fine balance between patience and persistence when pursuing new clients. The worst thing to do is make a new contact and never follow-up or make a return visit just to say hello and check on the status of their establishment. It is very common to come across an owner that is interested in our service and sees value in what we do, but the timing is just not right. They might be installing a new POS system, changing their menu or renovating, all of which are taking precedent over sitting down with you to discuss what we do and how we can increase their profits. So it is up to us to continue to follow up with them over time.........but not too often. How often is too often? It varies, each situation is different. You never want to come across as that guy who keeps coming in pestering to sell something. When you do stop in or make a follow up phone call, try and provide some value, maybe a link to an article that is related to the reason why you haven’t obtained a meeting yet (i.e New POS, renovations etc). If you find yourself to anxious and want to follow up every other day or week, then the real problem at hand is your pipeline is not full enough. If you have 10 contacts in the pipeline it is very easy to become overzealous and contact them too often. But if you have 80 contacts in the pipeline then you will naturally only have time to call a few of these leads each week and your frequency of contact will probably be spaced out to an appropriate length of time without being too annoying. So go work on getting 80 contacts in the pipeline!