Good morning Path to Warren podcast. This is Matt Warren. It is February 16 on a beautiful Wednesday morning, about 41 degrees. It’s going to be a high like 70 today. Gorgeous day. I wanted to share with you about a story that happened yesterday. When it comes to following up with clients, Let me just give you this story and set the setting for you. Yesterday when I got to work, it was a little early, about 7:45. I walked in the door and there’s a guy who’d already been working there for about an hour, and he says, hey, I responded to these two clients, prospective clients, to see where we are checking the status on these two cases. And I Cc’d you on it. And instantly I was like, oh, why did he CC me on the email to the clients? So, of course, I go back to my desk and I’ve got my routine where I do my journaling, I do my Gratitude list, I do my numbers. It doesn’t take that long, but he comes back in like 20 minutes later. What did you think of my email? What did you think of my email? I’m like, I haven’t got there yet, man. Okay, you’re doing your routine. You’re doing your routine. Because he knows I got a routine because I’ve gotten on him before about giving me at least 30 minutes of the time I get to work so I can get my thoughts straight and get my numbers straight and get my priorities on what I have to do today. Get that straight. So when I finally checked his emails, yes, he had carbon copied me on the email to these clients or potential clients about two different cases. Here’s the thing, I can’t stand it when people do this. There’s no reason to carbon copy me on the email. He needs the blind carbon copy me on the email. The customer doesn’t know who I am. So to the customer, it almost comes across as like he’s copying the boss and he’s double checking up on me. It’s pretty bad because I’m telling you, the client is not going to just respond. I mean, the client will not just reply back all. He doesn’t know who I am. He and she doesn’t know who I am. So they’re not going to reply all. It’s kind of putting the guilt trip on them. And the way that the email was written, it was very much like, hey, just wanted to check the status on this case. I’m perfect fit for it. I’ve been doing this for a long time. This is right up my alley. It’s like there was no value to the customer. There was no value to the case or the claim. It was just a follow up email. And he’s like, Oh, it was a ping. I pinged him. So he wanted to know what I thought. So I told him. I said, first of all, we were going to talk about what we were going to say in the business development meeting on Monday. We said we were going to discuss how to handle these cases the best way, meaning he and I were going to talk about the best way to handle these. But he decided to go ahead and just email them at 6:30 in the morning and copy me on them with an email that was just like, just wanted to check the status on this. My calendar is booking up. Just wanted to check the status. And I guarantee you… I told Jennifer, my boss, boss’s, boss, I said, by him doing this, it’s like flush in the toilet. There go those cases. Because now there’s no reasonable way of following up. We’ve now boxed ourselves. We’ve now put ourselves in a box. There could have been multiple ways of handling this better. My biggest thing was, number one, don’t carbon copy me on an email to the client. If the client doesn’t know who I am, that’s just like let me be the behind the scenes guy that is giving you things to say. Number two, your follow up email should have been with some sort of value add. There was zero value add. You didn’t add any value to that email. You didn’t add any value to the case. You didn’t help her situation. You simply followed up in a very selfish way about your case. What we should have done was we should have sent her an article. We should have found an article online about the kind of cases she’s dealing with. Say, hey, I saw this and thought about you. We could have written a blog about it and sent it to her. We could have thought about some red flags she might want to watch out for. With one client had water intrusion coming from the apartment above. We could have come up with something creative to say. At this stage, mold is probably coming in behind the studs. We need to watch out for that. The point is, he said, well I don’t have an article. And I said, well we can find one on the internet. There’s plenty of articles out there on the kind of stuff that she’s dealing with. Well, I don’t think that’s smart. I don’t think that’s smart to send them a competitor’s blog. I said, well we can come up with something. We can find something out there to send them. Just get the principle. The principle is we need to provide value. We’ve got to provide value and not just follow up. That’s the point. That’s the point. We were going to talk about how to handle these two claims and these two cases the best way. And you just sent an email, which means just talking this through… I don’t know of another way to follow up now on those claims because let me tell you, she’s not going to respond and he’s not going to respond. So now what do we do? Now what do we do.
