Drop-in meetings can be very effective.

David

Like others, I have called people once or twice a year for up to 7 years and left brief messages, and then had them call with an opportunity. Maybe they would listen to your voicemail messages, too–or even return your call. I’m not against emails, but I sense you might benefit from a richer mix of calls.

Ford Harding

I do have a couple of former clients from whom I’ve never heard back (going on two years of occasional, pithy emails) – if those efforts had been calls, i’d be discouraged; instead, who knows, maybe they’re reading them and will reach out one day?

I’ve had great success in just stopping by client’s offices for five minutes to say hi whenever I am out and about. Being in the area seems to be a valid reason to stop by. My clients have all seemed genuinely happy to take five minutes out of their day for me. In this down economy, most people seem to be less busy though. It also works because my practice is primarily local.
Mike Spack

Good points as usual. Sometimes you don’t know how to bring value to someone until you talk with them. You have to have confidence that you can provide value in real time exchanges often enough that your calls will be valued. It’s hard to help someone if you don’t know what is going on in their lives and you find that out by talking with them.

Ford Harding

I usually reply with two answers to this question:

1) As frequently as your communications are valuable.

2) More often than your gut feel says.

In the case of (1) it’s important to remember that both the message you follow-up with, and the medium you use affect the possibilities for frequency.

If you’re calling with some useful information, interesting news, or a valuable offer for them – then you can call pretty much as frequently as you want.

Clearly, the smart Rainmaker won’t treat this passively and wait for useful information, news or valuable offers to drop in their lap. They will create them – and so create the opportunity to follow-up. Not only can you hunt out useful information and news – but you can get pretty creative with rejigging and tailoring your services to create something interesting and fresh that people would be interested in hearing about.

The medium allows interesting possibilities too. By varying the medium you can increase frequency without it seeming too much. And some media allow for lighter, more frequent touches.

For example, phoning up or emailing all my contacts to tell them I’ve just run a business development training course that got great feedback would feel rather strange and pushy to them. But pop it in my Linkedin status update which many of them will notice when they log on to the site or get their weekly digest, and the message gently gets across (I’ve had a number of clients/partners contact me because of something they’ve seen in a Linkedin status update).

(2) is a little light-hearted, but I’ve found it to be true. To stereotype a tad, your typical car or double-glazing salesman’s gut feel of how frequently to contact is probably set way too high for most of us on the receiving end. But the professional’s is often set way too low. It’s in our nature to be conservative, to not want to come across as salesy or pushy. So we err on the side of too infrequent.

Ian