The follow-up email.  You know you should do it but it can easily slip to the bottom of your large pile of things to do.  

Example:  Your brilliant marketing team have just put on a wonderful breakfast event with a top speaker for your clients and prospects.  All you need to do is just turn up, drink tea and chat.  The moment you leave you start thinking about all the other things you must do that day.  

You sit at your desk and your Marketing/Bus Dev person sends you a note saying 'Make sure you FOLLOW UP with those you met at this mornings event.'   You know you need to but with what?  This is where the GoTo post comes in handy!

Create some posts that you know you can use again and again as a follow-up.  We often have the same conversations with different clients and prospects again and again.  Make sure you have some GoTo posts up your sleeve to send as the follow-up.  Dead easy and very effective.  You are not sending a sales email or a pathetic - lovely to meet you/hope we can do business email.  This is useful stuff you are sharing with folk who have challenges you know something about.

HINT - get your subject matter expert colleagues to write these goto posts for you.  Just tell them that what you need a post about to drive a relationship forward.  I do it all the time with the co-founders of Passle.  Works a treat as I can adopt their authority when sharing.  Plus it shows the width and breadth of our expertise...

This post is obviously a goto post for me.  This morning  I was talking about 'posting deliberately and sharing strategically.'   I will be sharing this post as a follow up this afternoon.  (It took 10 mins to write this which is about the same as an email but hopefully it will be more powerful - plus I can use it again and again).

Here are some of the other goto posts I use regularly:

Edelman / LinkedIn research – we quote this often in our pitches:

How Sales can play a key role in content creation that will make an unaware, engaged prospect or current client buy Earlier today I watched this webinar by Edelman PR and LinkedIn who have leveraged their high-value network to ask 1300 senior decision makers what difference thought leadership content makes to their buying process. I've highlighted the outcomes... Read more  or Share via: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

Five things that make content influential and how to get all Five.  According to Edelman, the five components of good thought-leadership are that it is: Relevant, Insightful, Digestible, Trusted and Current. The challenge for us when creating and sharing content is to achieve all five of these for our... Read more or Share via: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

Short-form outperforms Long-form - Edelman and LinkedIn  Edelman and LinkedIn have done some research on what works with Thought Leadership. Some of the findings are quite surprising. Not least, that brevity itself is highly valued. Other things that are called out (see text below or slide 21 for... Read more or Share via: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

‘Influence’ by Robert Cialdini – 6 pillars of Influence:

I read this so you don't have to... 6 highlights from 'Influence' by Dr Robert Cialdini I was introduced to this book by the team of ex-military folk at Applied Influence Group. Here are my favourite highlights: The 6 Principles of Influence & Persuasion: Cialdini identifies the 6 principles of influence and... Read more or Share via: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

Cialdini's 6 principles of influence: Reciprocity A couple of years ago I went to a talk by Paul Smith, Chairman of Eversheds, who ran through his business development techniques. As with many bright people he made it all sound ludicrously simple. One of the methods he used, back in the... Read more or Share via: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

Using Content to Sell:

Name-checking & Linkedin - a great way to approach senior decision makers When you share content on LinkedIn you can name-check people to alert them that you think the thing you are sharing will be interesting to them. Importantly you do not need to be connected with them on LinkedIn to do this. But of... Read more or Share via: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

How to nurture leads, the authentic and personal way The statistics below strongly demonstrate that best-in-class sales organisations, whether a law firm, consultancy or technology business, all receive higher business returns if they nurture buyer relations: On average, 50% of the leads in any... Read moreor Share via: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Google PlusLeadership through content creation:

Using published content as a leadership tool:

The Importance of Giving your Future Leaders a Voice The following quote from Sir Alex Ferguson's book on leadership got me thinking about the role less senior staff play when it comes to demonstrating domain expertise. Often, firms rely on their most senior leaders when positioning their... Read more Share via: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

Using public content for internal communications I was part of a discussion recently about how best to influence people within a company, how a leadership team can best communicate with their own organisation. There were two camps; those who advocated private communications (intranets,... Read moreShare via: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus

An example of targeted content – CMO Deloitte:

Deloitte CMO - B2B Marketing Is Becoming (P2P) Person to Person This article was actually written a few years ago, however, I stumbled across it as I was researching effective ways for professionals to execute account-based marketing. It appears Annabel Rake, CMO of Deloitte, was ahead of her time in 2015 when... Read moreShare via: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Google Plus