In today's video, you'll learn how often you should follow up with your potential consulting clients...and the right way to do it without coming across as too pushy or "salesy."

TRANSCRIPT:

Alright, here's a quick question that I got from a consultant in the community. And it's, "how often should I follow up with prospective clients if I don't hear back from them?"

Hey, it's Michael Zipursky from consultingsuccess.com and I want to share my observation and thoughts around this very common question. It's, you know, happens all the time where you reach out to an ideal client, maybe there's even a bit of communication back and forth, but then all of a sudden, they kind of, you know, disappear on you. And there's silence in that communication. So what do you do and how do you do it? And how often, right, should you do it? Because the big concern that many consultants have is they don't want to be, come across as being salesy. They don't want to come across as being too pushy. And they don't want to interrupt their ideal clients.

One of our clients has seen great success by following up. In fact, 90 plus percent of their business comes from follow up and here's what they do. They follow up with their ideal clients, people who they have had some initial conversation and communication with every two weeks. And how long do they do that for? Forever. Right, as long as they still are an ideal client and as long as that person has said, has not said, don't contact me anymore. So as long as you know, everything is still okay, they will continue following up every two weeks forever.

Now that you might go like, "what? Every two weeks?" In fact, I just spoke to a client this morning And she said to me, she's like, "what? I should follow up every two to three weeks? Are you serious?" That just sounds like so much but it's not. Here's why. We live in an environment today where we are surrounded by so much noise, so much information, so many offers. Like, our stimuli are just going crazy to the point where our attention spans have shrunken down, right, so much you probably experienced this as well.

And so therefore, even though you yourself think, "I don't know if I should reach out to that person 'cause I just talked them two weeks ago or three weeks ago." It's not going to feel like two to three weeks ago for them. They likely have forgotten that you even contacted them, right. Why? Because they're getting so many emails, they're getting so many phone calls and voicemails and all other kinds of stuff that they've forgotten about you, right.

We are our own worst critics, we overanalyze, right, all of the different situations of things that could happen. But the reality is the person that you're reaching out to, doesn't look at it the same way that you do, they're not thinking about you. In fact, they don't care about you, right, they care about themselves, they care about their own situation. And so if you believe that you might be able to help them to make their situation better, you have a responsibility to reach out to them and to stay top of mind. That's what follow up is about, right.

Follow up isn't about hard pressure and sales and, you know, weird persuasion that is uncomfortable. It's about staying top of mind with your ideal clients. And so what I would recommend, what I recommend to our coaching clients, and when we actually kind of break down and give them specific processes and templates to follow, but the overview if I can offer it to you right now is stay top of mind by getting in front of your ideal clients, at least every two to three weeks.

And don't just do it through one medium. Don't just do it through a LinkedIn message. Don't just do it through email, don't just do it through phone, don't just do it through written mail, do it through all of them, right. Use SMS text messages, use email, use LinkedIn messages, use phone calls, and voicemail. Use, you know, printed mail, use all of it, and don't use it all at once, right. Use it at different times. Because different people respond to different mediums in different ways.

And so you want to just stay top of mind in the most, you know, in many different ways, because one way will resonate better with them, one way will catch them a little bit different, it'll stand out, it won't get lost in all the clutter and all of the noise. But here's the big thing, right, when you do follow up, as I said, it's not about sale. It's not about pressure. It's not if you're following up every two to three weeks saying hey, "I haven't heard back from you. You know, I'd like to have that meeting." Then you become a pest and no one likes that. So what do you do? You focus on being friendly, you focus on adding value, focus on the relationship.

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