Whether you’re learning to swing a golf club, baseball bat or tennis racquet, coaches always emphasize the importance of follow-through.   It’s not just hitting the ball that matters, but how you continue your swing once contact is made.

The Importance of Follow-Through

Whether you’re learning to swing a golf club, baseball bat or tennis racquet, coaches always emphasize the importance of follow-through.   It’s not just hitting the ball that matters, but how you continue your swing once contact is made.

The same thing applies in networking, sales, and almost any work situation: without purposeful follow-through on your actions and interactions with others, you won’t be able to reach your professional potential.  “Failure to meet deadlines, honor commitments, monitor staff, return calls and keep track of long-term projects is the most underrated cause of chaos and failure in business life,” writes Stephanie Winston inOrganized for Success.

Often we feel we’ve completed a task because the action plan is in progress, but we underemphasize how powerful it is to continue developing, tracking and monitoring operations and relationships even after the plan is in action.  As Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan state in Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, “Follow-through is the cornerstone of execution, and every leader who’s good at executing follows through religiously.  Following through ensures that people are doing the things they committed to do, according to the agreed timetable.”

Not sure where to begin?  Take meetings, for instance.  A plan for follow-through should be detailed at the end of every meeting.  “Never finish a meeting without clarifying what the follow through will be, who will do it, what resources they will use, and how and when the next review will take place and with whom,” Bossidy and Charan suggest.

Organizing and Delegating 
A good organizational system will support follow-through more than almost anything.  If you are among the organizationally challenged, do one of two things:

1. Make a vow, buy a book on organization, reserve a day, and just do it.  Get organized once and for all.  You’re less likely to follow through well, if at all, when the disorganization gremlin has hold of you.  Getting organized is one of the biggest keys to success; not doing so is an extremely common and most unfortunate form of self-sabotage.

2. Hire someone to organize you and keep you that way. The investment will pay for itself when you begin following through more consistently.

Delegating should also be part of an organizational system.  “Getting things done through others is a fundamental leadership skill,” according to Bossidy and Charan.  Delegating is an efficient way to ensure that the greatest number of tasks, including follow-up tasks, get done in the shortest amount of time.  In other words, if you want to be successful, don’t be afraid to share the workload with others.

Ways to Excel at Follow-through

Follow through means being proactive and keeping your word as you work to achieve your goals.  Below are some additional considerations regarding follow-through.

• When you say you’ll do something, be reliable in meeting your commitment, whether to a client, supervisor, customer or direct-report.  If you can’t deliver it, don’t promise it.
• Timely follow up can mean the difference between landing or losing a client or sale.  Reconnect with people soon after meeting them, and they will be more likely to remember you, increasing the likelihood they will eventually buy from you.
• Send a thank you note after you provide a complimentary sales call.  This will make you stand out from the others, inviting an ongoing relationship to develop or continue to develop.  Also, a short thank-you note gives you a great excuse to add anything you forgot to say during the call, or to highlight your main points again.
• All top salespeople are masters at follow-through.  Lack of follow-through is the primary element missing when sales are not keeping pace with leads generated.  You may have hundreds of leads with a great deal of potential, but unless you follow through and actively market/sell to these leads, they will not turn into sales.
• Following through after sales have been made also makes good financial sense.  Getting business from new customers cost significantly more than securing additional business from existing customers.

In sports, you have to focus on practicing your follow-through as you perfect your swings, and business is no different.  Continue to practice or develop a new habit to follow-through on a day-to-day, consistent basis.  As with your sports swings, the practice will make follow-through become more automatic, and you will find yourself more capable to meet your goals and achieve success!

Author’s content used under license, © 2008 Claire Communications