10 March 3 From ghosting to growth - the funds are in the follow up!
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the business of executive coaching. I'm Ellie Scarf, an ex lawyer turned executive coach. Over the last 17 years, I've coached in house, I've been an associate coach, and I've run executive coaching businesses with teams of coaches around the world. My clients have ranged from global brand names to boutiques, start ups,
I now run the Impact Coach Collective, a community of executive coaches who want to level up their business skills and take action in a community of like minded peers. I'm a traveller, a reader, a mum, wife and dog parent, and I know first hand that our stories have a huge impact on our businesses. The executive coaching business is tough, and I've learnt all the lessons, through plenty of mistakes.
And also with some great mentors. This podcast is all about growing a thriving executive coaching business. [00:01:00] You can build a coaching business that is profitable, sustainable, and that supports your personal goals, whatever they are. I'll be sharing tips and ideas translated for your context, as well as stories from the field with brilliant coaches and mentors.
If you want to level up your executive coaching business skills, then this is the place for you.
Hello and welcome to the business of executive coaching. So today I want to share with you a simple reminder. Now, the concept I'm going to share might not be the most complex and it might be pretty quick for me to describe really. , but it might just be the thing that brings in significant revenue into your coaching business if you do it right.
And that is the power of following up. So, all right, you might be rolling your eyes and saying, yes, Ellie, of course I follow up. But I wonder if you really do, [00:02:00] I've had business coaches over the years that have taught me this lesson in a few ways. One said consistently that the funds are in the follow up.
Another one said the fortunes in the follow up, but whichever way you find catchiest. Write it down or embed that phrase in your brain, like an annoying TikTok song, because it's important and it's true and it is deeply and consistently underestimated by coaches. So what do I really mean when I say follow up?
I mean that when you have met with a prospective client and it doesn't really matter if it was an individual or a corporate client, in fact, this is probably largely industry nonspecific, but typically you will have met a client and then you've sent them some pricing. At that point, a few things can happen for you, right?
They can say yes. And you happily proceed to, you know, set them up as a client and do the work. But often that isn't the case. So sometimes they, [00:03:00] they will come back to you and they want to change the scope or they want to ask for a discount. And so negotiations go on and then they become a client. On other occasions, they'll come back to you and they'll say no, and they'll give you the reason.
They say, for this reason, we won't be proceeding. Okay, fine. But many opportunities don't transpire like this. You just hear nothing or you hear nothing related to a yes or a no. And so what happens in that period is that our brains start to make conclusions and they're generally not good conclusions. So they're generally things like.
Oh, well, they haven't replied. So they think I'm a terrible coach or, Oh, well, they haven't replied. So clearly they think my pricing is outrageously high and I couldn't possibly be worth that sort of money. You get my drift. We fill in the dots and we generally fill it in with whatever our most negative assumptions about ourselves are now in reality.
And I think we all know that this is not accurate in reality, but in [00:04:00] reality, they are busy or they are seeking approval higher up the chain in an organization, or they didn't get the email. Or they're wondering about whether they can negotiate, but they feel bad because they don't want to, , you know, nickel and dime you.
Or they have been forced by internal processes that they were hoping to avoid. They've been forced to get three quotes. There are so many reasons why we don't hear back immediately. , but our brains don't always like to let the logic get in the way of our negative assumptions. So of course, if we have this set of negative assumptions or negative feelings and what can we do, right?
We, , well, what we tend to do is we give ourselves a really hard time and we therefore avoid the person or the issue. And that means we can tend to avoid following up. And because it is a very natural response. Yes, we could do, you know, we could coach ourselves. We could do some CBT on ourselves to try and convince ourselves that, you know, of the data and that there is a logical response.
But [00:05:00] what we can also do is acknowledge that it feels pretty crap and lean on process instead, right? And say, okay. I have a process for this. I have templates for this, and I have a follow up plan, which I put in place to make sure we don't leave money on the table. So I'm going to share what a follow up plan might look like in a moment, but I want to share a couple of examples of how not following up could have left hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table.
So I, I think it must be five or six or even seven years ago. I pitched for some work coaching two leaders in a major maritime organization. I had a great chat with HR. I had a great chat with the CEO. We really hit it off. I understood the brief and I sent through what I thought was a really great proposal.
It wasn't outrageously expensive, , but it was also, you know, well priced. It would solve the issue that they were working through. And so I hadn't heard for a week and I followed up. And I heard nothing and two weeks, nothing. [00:06:00] Okay. So I took a break and I followed up at, I think it was probably the, the three month point, nothing.
After one year, I reconnected and I got a response. Now, of course I had assumed this piece of work was dead in the water. I was really busy. It didn't particularly bother me. , but I just assumed that they had gone with someone else or that they didn't think my team of coaches and I were the right fit.
All of the above, but I had a process of sorts and I followed it. And I got a response actually at this one year point. Letting me know what had happened in the interim. And that was that the organization had been through a merger with another company that were just coming out of that they had, you know, all these leadership teams had had to, had to merge and that rather than just two coaches, they wanted us to work with the entire leadership team of a whole division as both individuals.
And as a team and including three sixties and stakeholder feedback for everyone, it was a big and [00:07:00] awesome piece of work. I had six coaches engaged on it and it came to us through this consistent follow up and check in process, consistent. But not annoying, right? Not harassing, , consistent. And it was not, there was no sort of no passive aggressiveness or aggressiveness in it.
And it actually ended up that, , my business set up a much bigger leadership program after this in the, these organizations that was deployed across all their subsidiary organizations. So it ended up being a huge engagement and continues to this day. Another example, , is that I. I hopped into the community , on Facebook for my program, the corporate to coach accelerator.
And I just put a little reminder to encourage everyone. I think it was on a Monday to take five minutes to follow up with just one lead that had gone cold after pricing or proposal within one hour, one of my members replied and said that they did it. And they had just [00:08:00] had a client completely confirm and book a corporate coaching engagement.
It is a very powerful process. The funds truly are in the follow up, but how do we follow up? This question usually comes with, , some, some fears, right? And I have these fears too, which is that I really don't want to be annoying and I don't want them to feel harassed or hassled. And I don't want to be.
That pushy salesperson, like I agree with all these things. I don't want to be those things either. So that was important to me when I built my followup process is that it feels like I am, you know, really taking on board, you know, really respecting where they're at and also really respecting their right to not want to work with me.
Right. Which I do. It's like, I'm not for everyone. That's okay. So, , my process now with my coaching clients is as follows. So after I've sent a proposal or a pricing, some pricing information, after a couple of days, I follow up to check that they received it [00:09:00] and to let them know that I'm available to answer any questions that they have or get on a call if they'd prefer.
Now one idea that I heard once that I think is actually genius is to schedule a short call when you're in the pitch meeting, right before you, , when you say you're about, you're going to send the pricing, schedule a meeting then for, you know, a week later or To specifically discuss the proposal. , and I think that's great.
So you sort of have a built in in person discussion point built in, but short of that, , you know, I just follow up and I offer to answer questions. If they don't reply to that, then I would follow up about a week later. And again, it's not, I don't want to be hassled. I'm not hassling them. It's actually most people find this quite helpful because I don't know about you, but I regularly get overwhelmed by my inbox and sometimes I need a reminder of things.
And that one week point, if I haven't done something, there is a chance that I really want to want to take action, but I've just, it's just fallen too far down in my inbox and I've, I've lost , that [00:10:00] prompt. If you don't hear anything, I would then give it a month, right? Give them a month. , often you'll hear, , but then I would check in again that allows people to have gone on holidays or, you know, to have worked through, you know, being sick and then be back on board.
So , another month after that, then nothing, then I would check in at the three month point and then another six months later. And the six months later one, I would really read the room in relation to that one. If you had great conversations, you felt connection. You felt like you want to just stay in touch regardless of the opportunity.
Then I would continue to keep in touch. , of course, all of these changes, if, and when they reply to you. So as soon as they reply to you, you stop the process and you engage back , in , that discussion around the opportunity to implement these stages. All you need to do is actually just have it, have it written down somewhere.
What is your followup process? And then every time you send a followup message, you diarize the next one. So you would say, okay, well, I've just done , my [00:11:00] one week, , follow up. Then I'm just going to schedule a, something for a month's time. And you might get to a month's time and say, Oh no, we've already talked about that.
So then you would just ignore that reminder. Now inside the, , accelerator, we have a pipeline, a sales pipeline document. , that helps you keep tabs on all your prospects. So, you know, you could create something similar or join us in the accelerator and use this tool, but the whole point is knowing who is at what stage so that you don't forget about them.
And you know, you know, Oh yeah, well, this is sort of sitting out there. I need to make sure I remember to follow up. You also need to be really mindful of your tone when you send these messages. So you don't want to be aggressive, or I think even worse, passive aggressive. , that is a risk here. So, the messages should be understanding, should be positive, should be helpful, and should also be authentic, right?
Should just be you. They don't have to be overly formal, , and they certainly shouldn't, you know, come with any sort of assumption that someone , should have to work with you. [00:12:00] One thing I would say is that, Once you get past that sort of three to six months, you can choose to be a little more direct.
And so one strategy I like to use is that after about six months, you can follow up and you can say, hi, , , whatever their name is, I'm just closing this opportunity or this engagement out in my books. And I wanted to say, thank you for the opportunity. And please do keep in touch if you would like to solve problem X.
So it might be, you know, if you want to, Offer leadership development opportunities to your middle managers in the future, or, you know, , , have an intervention with team X who are suffering from X. , more often than not, when you tell them you are closing it out, you will get A response. , and often it can spark another conversation or it'll spark an explanation.
, sometimes it will just prompt them to reengage in the conversation. , because generally when it gets to this point, and if they're willing to reply to you, the issue is usually organizational. So that, , the problem has changed, people have changed, the organization has been [00:13:00] through a big change. So, you know, I would, you can be a bit more direct at that point.
So just to summarize, don't forget that follow up is a vital part of business growth. It's not just about new calls all the time. It is about making sure we get the highest conversion rates possible from the ones that we have. Don't forget that what you might think is a snub or think is being ghosted is generally not, and that engagements can take much longer than we think in a corporate context.
So having a system that you can implement can take the sting out of feeling like you've been ghosted or rejected by potential clients. And having that system can also remove the psychological friction, ,, and the overthinking that can stop us from following up and for really going after the work that we've pitched.
Okay. So if you struggle with clients, ghosting you, or, you know, how you react to that experience, or you might be overthinking your [00:14:00] responses or your outreach, . Or if you just want to talk about how to do some of these business basics, please go to the link in the show notes and book a call with me. I would love to learn more about your business.
I'd love to give you some tips and answer your specific questions and share a little bit about what we do in the corporate to coach accelerator and how we help coaches get their next 10 corporate clients with less than five hours of marketing per week. I really look forward to speaking with you. , please do book a call and I'll be back next week with a another episode.
See you later.
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This episode was brought to you by the Impact Coach Collective, where executive coaches grow their businesses in a [00:15:00] community of peers with business education, mentoring, deal clinics, and more. If you'd like to contact me or work with me further, all my free resources, courses, and more info on the Impact Coach Collective can be found at elliescarf.com.
Have a brilliant week, and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
