As  always I'll start with the soundtrack to this post. You can read about why I add soundtrack to every post I write. This is this post's soundtrack:

A few days ago I followed up with a friend of mine (Eran Gilad, CEO of Tracx, a great tool for social media management). Just an arbitrary catching up. In his response he wrote something that hung in my head for a few days. He said "followups are key for success". And as much as it's an obvious thing to say I think that people are underestimating followups. Here I'll give a few tips on how to remind yourself to followup, after every meeting. Even if the meeting is not that important for you. You can never know. Always remember that you have to be nice to people and appreciate the time they spent to meet you. Exactly the way you expect people to treat you. People are busy and they are not sitting around waiting for you to have a meeting with them. And after a meeting you have to followup again and again to make sure that shit gets done the way you discussed in the meeting.

I won't go over on how to followup. There are tons of posts out there that tackle exactly that. I'll just share how do I remind myself to followup and catch up with people:

1. Don't mark the reminder for the meeting as read

   If you're used to remind yourself about meetings with an email then don't mark this email as read until you send a followup email. Other reminders people use are SMSs or notifications on their Smartphone. The same can be applied to these reminders. Don't clear the reminder until you followed up  to every meeting you attend!

2. Put the business card you got on your screen

   Silly, but it works. Sometimes, after a day full of back-to-back meetings, half of my screen is covered with business cards.
   It reminds me of how my parents browser looks like because they somehow installed too many toolbars and now they have a thin strip that actually shows the website content…

   

3. Use a CRM

   Use a tool that will manage for you all your sales leads, investors, advisors and  generally all your contacts. While SalesForce is the leading CRM software out there I prefer something much simpler. I use Streak. Streak turns your Gmail into a CRM and it's doing it great. You can put your contacts in boxes such as Sales or BizDev and add reminders so you'll not forget to catch up with people. If you're using other CRM you can use Ecquire to capture contacts in your Gmail and send them to your CRM.

4. Find out if people are reading your followup emails

   A great tool I love to use from time to time is Bananatag. Bananatag lets you know if people are opening your emails and if they clicked on links. This tool lets you know that your message arrived and was read by the people you send emails to. Sometimes email gets into people's spam folder and not a lot of people will check there for your email so a lot of times you'll have to make sure that people got your email. It also lets you know if people are interested in what you're offering. A lot of times it helped me figure out if I need to send another email or just get the message that the person is not interested.

5. Every meeting should have action items

   Every meeting you make should have action items after it. For all the parties at the meeting. Without action items the meeting is a waste of time. And action items are the best way to remind you to followup. This is your motivator. You want the people in the meeting to execute on their action items because they're probably things that will help you. That's got to make you want to followup, summarize the meeting and let everybody know what their action items are. Add a reminder with Streak to followup again after a few days.

I'll be happy to hear if you have any other tips for following up and recommendations on tools that might help.