Saturday, August 27, 2005

Be a Connected Twinkie

How fresh is the memory of you with your contacts? Become the twinkie. You have to stay forever fresh in their mind or they will think of the person they just met and refer them, buy from them, etc. It is just plain human nature to think of people that you just met or communicated with lately. It is why I have had five lawyers in six years in business. I tend to meet a lot of them and if something is on my plate that day, I may have them do it for me. Lawyers I have met tend to work hard to get a new account but do not realize that unless they follow up regularly, people tend to drift away. You have to be the Twinkie Lawyer is you want to retain more accounts. I just ran into David Ramsell, a graphics designer I have known for years. He is very good and inexpensive, but I have not talked with him in a long time. It turns out we should have been using him for some graphics work, but I'd just plain forgotten about his prices compared to other people we are using. He made a point to reiterate his pricing to me when we ran into each other, after talking for a while. Excellent move, because I assume everyone is in roughly the same range. It has been my experience that a few emails a year is enough to create a lasting impression instead of fading into the sunset of another networking event. Keeping your network of connections fresh is what nights and weekends were made for.