the importance of following up on requests

you can certainly feel the importance of following up on requests if you are a good product manager, as you probably follow up on orders from your customers quite frequently. 

whether you are following up on orders from existing customers or new customers, it is a part of your responsibility as a good product manager. unfortunately, it can be tempting to skip a beat and just keep on working on the next order, regardless of how much you know about a customer. it would be better to avoid any potential misunderstanding and complete your work on time.

when someone has sent you an inquiry, it means that they have put forth a request for more information or for a quote. that means you now have a responsibility to work quickly to accommodate their needs. if you don't follow up with the request, you may be sending the request to the wrong person or missing an opportunity to increase your leads or sales. the quicker you can get back to these people, the sooner you can complete work on their request and move on to the next request. a product management system can help you do just that.

in order to avoid missing any opportunities to make your sales or service better, you need to stay on top of your follow ups on requests. by scheduling a time for follow up on each request, you will keep in touch with those who are most interested in your products or services. this way you can stay on top of your competition and ensure that your business always has an opening for new clients. you can also take some of the guesswork out of whether you can meet a request, because you will have an easy way to tell when you have completed your work on it.

as you begin to learn more about customers and what they want, you will be able to tailor your follow ups to meet the needs of each particular customer. once you learn the difference between each type of client, you can tailor your follow up to match the needs of each one. for instance, if you only offer your products and services to students, you should follow up more often with parents of children, high-school-aged students, and even adults. depending on the frequency of your follow up, you can add more messages to your emails or you can send different follow up messages to each lead.

some marketers choose to automate their follow up system by creating autoresponder scripts. you can find these programs on the internet or in some software packages. however, a real live system is much more effective and can save you a lot of time. the system works by automatically sending out follow up emails as soon as you receive a request for additional information. it sends out the same follow up message to every contact in your database. if the lead provides contact information such as phone number and address, the follow up email will include a link to your website where they can find out more information about your products or services.

if you want to follow up on requests, it is important that you keep track of your on-time delivery rates. when you receive an email with a request for more information, you should always start your follow up process immediately. otherwise, you might find yourself getting frustrated with incomplete follow ups and increased bounce rates.

article by: mirko francioni