Follow-up
The Grasshopper showed up in a moment of pique yesterday and gave me a title for another book I’ll never write: “If You Don’t Follow-up, Your Lack of Results Will Take You Down.”
I have literally booked thousands of hotel meeting rooms and overnight guest rooms over the years in conjunction with my seminar business. My contact conversation with the hotel sales person follows a checklist. I don’t move on to the next item on the list until I have confirmation on the item we just discussed. It then gets a checkmark. Call me anal, but I find my memory improves a hundredfold when I write things down.
We then exchange signed documents via email and fax that confirm the items on the checklist. How many times would you suspect that the items that painstakingly were gone over and agreed to, verbally and in writing, don’t happen? The answer is, “a lot.”
Side note: When I call those hotels back for future bookings, the people who failed to follow-up are generally not there any longer.
It is a demonstrated fact in my world that people don’t follow-up. I coined a phrase years ago that sums this up, “Businesses don’t run themselves.”
I have found that in order to get what was agreed to, I have to follow-up with those who don’t. If this sounds like a rant, it is. But I know I’m having a powerless chat with the wind.
The reality is that we all have to follow-up to get what we agreed to. That goes for professional and personal relationships as well. How many of us were in “set-it-and-forget-it” relationships and our failure to follow-up lead us down the road to separate paths? The numbers are staggering.
The older I get, the less I agree to. That doesn’t mean being disagreeable. It simply means that if I have an objection, I voice it up-front rather than have it be something I quietly agree to but fail to follow-up on later.
Follow-up is a fact of life. It’s what turns agreed to facts into fruition.
If you aren’t the leader in your own life, chances are that you’re following an unproductive lead and you aren’t following-up. Do some follow-up on your lack of follow-up and follow the pathway to more success.
All the best,
John
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