Appreciation Marketing – Procrastination, The Art of Failure

Procrastination is one of the worst practices that you can adopt.  While being dishonest or unethical rank high with failed businesses, procrastination can kill a business very quickly.  We can all work hard to develop our prospects, maintain our customer base, and keep abreast of new marketing trends and ideas, but we can lose our competitive edge by allowing procrastination to take over our practices.

Does everyone that you know or meet, know what your business is?  Are you ashamed of what you do for a living?  Your neighbors, your family, everyone that you know must know what your business is.  What if your neighbor tells you about this great product or service that they just purchased from your competitor or someone else in your company?  Don’t want to impose on your neighbors or friends?  You are doing them a disservice by not sharing great products or services with them.  What if they have a great referral for you that you may miss by keeping your business a secret?

Procrastination’s most prominent aspect is lack of follow up with your prospects and clients.  You must follow up with everyone.  Do not prejudge anyone; always treat everyone as a potential client, every client as a potential referral source, and every referral as a valued prospect.  Follow up, follow up, and follow up with everyone; omit no one from your follow up.  Businesses have many new clients as a result of their consistent, persistent follow up.

Think that you can put off contacting that referral that someone gave to you?  You do a disservice to the person giving it to you if you delay.  Also, don’t forget to thank the person giving that referral to you, letting them know how much you appreciate them putting money into your pocket.  If the referral didn’t work out well, tell the referring party how much you appreciated the referral, but also let them know why it didn’t work out.

One of the aspects of procrastination is isolation.  When you procrastinate in your business you tend to isolate yourself.  You stop calling prospects, your stop talking with clients, and you don’t meet with your networking partners.  You cannot grow and develop yourself if you isolate yourself.  You get stale, lose your competitive edge, and cease to learn new techniques and relearn those techniques that you have stopped using.  Some people believe that they don’t need anyone else and never speak to anyone in person or by phone.  They try to communicate by email, fax, text, and social media.  They are usually failures in their business and in life.

Procrastination is the principle of the doubting businessperson.  We all experience it from time to time; we must not allow it to grow and fester in our brain and heart.  We must recognize it for what it is, a killer of business success.  We have to root it out and purge any remnant of it from our day to day actions.  If we allow it to take over our lives, we will not experience any success, because it will dominate our actions.

Today write a card to someone, make a call to someone, or make an appointment to go see someone.  Maybe you could just drop into someone’s business and see if they have a moment.  Let me know what you do and what happens, and we can share with others.  Leave me your comments, or email me at Jim@SOC4Now.com, or call me at 360-314-8691.  Get out of your shell and tell people about your business and what you can do to make their lives better.  If you give to give, not to get, you will succeed and prosper, and you will fell better about yourself.  Just get in motion and take action.