Have you ever not followed up with a prospect?
I’m betting there’s a good chance the answer is yes. I know I’ve stumbled on this step more than a handful of times.
There are reasons we don’t follow up with new connections or on proposals and pitches.
Sometimes you get busy and simply forget.
Other times, you feel awkward or pushy.
And other times, you might be at a loss for what to say.
In my experience, most of these reasons boil down to the same reason — I worry that the person on the other end will be annoyed with me, that they’ll think less of me, that they *gulp* won’t like me.
If following up makes you uncomfortable too, it’s time to work on overcoming that discomfort because it isn’t often that you land a project on first contact. Which makes good follow up essential to your successful business.
Here are three things to help you get past your reluctance to follow up diligently.
It Gets Easier with Practice
The more you practice following up on conversations, introductions, proposals, and pitches, the easier it gets to write and send those messages.
You’ll find that it starts to feel more natural.
And you’ll see that hardly anybody (maybe even nobody) responds negatively to your follow-up messages. (The most negative response you’ll usually get is no response at all.)
Even better… with practice, you’ll start to see some positive results from your efforts.
That all adds up to less uneasiness about reaching out to follow up.
It’s Actually Helpful for Your Recipient
I’ve talked to plenty of writers who worry about being a pest.
As long as you’re polite, brief, relevant, useful, and easy-going in your follow-up messages, you don’t have anything to worry about.
If the prospect isn’t interested, it’s likely they just won’t reply. But they won’t harbor any ill will toward you either.
And if they are interested, your follow-up message is helpful. Marketing managers and the other people who hire copywriters get very busy. It’s possible your recipient loved your idea, wanted to give it some thought before saying yes, and then got distracted with all the other things they needed to do.
When you follow up, you give them a way to quickly act on something they wanted to act on anyway.
You’re Nurturing a Relationship
You don’t have to treat every follow-up message as a “re-pitching” of your previous idea.
You can take different approaches. Perhaps a new report was released by an industry leader with data about how helpful your kind of project is. You could share that report in your message. Perhaps you saw a news item about the company. You could send a note to congratulate them. Perhaps you published something that might be useful to them. You could send them a link.
The point is, your follow-up messages are about reminding them of your proposal or pitch, but they’re also about continuing the conversation. So take a breath, relax, remember you’re writing to a person, and come from a place of generosity.
Improving your follow-up game has the potential to make a huge, positive shift in your business. So commit to practicing this skill, and start following up with new connections and on proposals three, four, even five times. Obviously, give yourself some time in between each follow up. You don’t want to come across as impatient. But do the follow up! You’ll see much more success when you do.
In Case You Missed It
Doing great work for your clients is fun. But doing great work for your clients, helping them to measure performance, and seeing how much difference your work makes is even better. If thinking about metrics and performance gives you a case of the heebie-jeebies, our latest Web & SEO Copywriting column is just the thing to put those jangled nerves at ease. Inside, Jonna Jerome looks at a basic plan to get you familiar with content marketing metrics so you and your client can see how you’re helping them achieve their goals.
Do you have a Unique Value Proposition? If you don’t, you’re going to love our most recent Reality Blog. Jennifer Ayling explores the StoryBrand process for creating a UVP for your business and for each of your services. This will give you a much more confident and valuable way to highlight how you help your clients.
When you write content for your clients — blog posts, articles, special reports, reviews, or what have you — there are all sorts of opportunities to create fantastic social media posts from what you’ve written. And doing this is a great way to deliver more value to your clients, and it also allows you to charge higher fees. Check out the newest Social Media column from Bonnie Fanning to see how you can create social media posts that catch attention and bring more people to the content you worked so hard on.
Coming Up on Digital Copywriter
Our next Monthly Member Update is on the calendar. In this live webinar, we’ll look at effective time management techniques that help you focus better and get more done. Plus, we’ll talk about new content on the site, things to watch for in June, and any questions you have about growing your business. I hope you’ll join us!
We also have our Quarter Two Challenge kicking off in just a few days. This Challenge is to turn on Creator mode, and then to post to LinkedIn every day. You’ll see how much your audience grows, and how many more conversations you’ll be able to have with people from your target audience. This fun Challenge has a fantastic prize tied to it, so be sure to check out the details.
3 Things I Thought You Might Enjoy…
Do you struggle with confidence? I know a lot of writers do, which is why I really appreciated this unique take on confidence building from Guillermo Rubio. I especially like his second suggestion.
Need a little inspiration for writing your LinkedIn bio and summary? HubSpot shares 17 excellent examples to get your ideas flowing.
Finally, Neil Patel has a write up of several affordable tools that can help you succeed in your freelance writing business.
That’s all for now. Have a great weekend!
