Heart-Centered Sales: The Art of the Follow Up and Nurture

Ever struggle with whether to follow up with someone who expressed interest in your services, but never got back to you?

Integrative Health Practitioners and Coaches are often heart-centered people, and generally are very careful not to come across as pushy or salesy. But then, how do we make that next step if someone has shown interest, but they haven't yet acted on it?

A buddy from my coaching group recently shared this when I asked if he plans to follow up with someone who was interested in his services:

“I’m going to check in with my client, see how he's doing and see if he wants to talk - and maybe revisit that conversation we had about my services. This is the part of being in business that makes me uncomfortable. I don’t want him to think I am following up to sell to him...and I don’t want him to feel awkward. I really do care about him and his well-being.”

Here was my response:

Yeah, I hear ya. There’s an art to the follow up. I generally approach follow ups by orienting to a simple question:

“How can I add value?”

Since I have a system in place for my lead nurture strategy, I generally lean towards finding a way to bring them into orbit of my nurture efforts so that I can stay top of mind with them and continue delivering value in small ways.

In my opinion, the best way to do that is to offer an invitation of some sort that could add value. It could be a casual, personal invitation to a free event you’re hosting. You could forward them an email or blog you wrote that is relevant to their current situation, and invite them to subscribe to your email list (i.e. “I thought of you, and felt to share this - do you think this could potentially be of value to you?“).

If they opt in to your email list, they’ll likely be receiving a regular pulse of invitations to have further interactions with you (i.e. workshops, free coaching call offers, promos, or even just straight nurture emails giving valuable). Your emails can even prompt your audience to respond and let you know what they think about the topic of the email newsletter - people like sharing their opinions (if they have one).

You could also offer to send them someone else’s resource (like an article, podcast, video or book) that is relevant to their situation, saying something like “hey, I was thinking about you…thought to share this with you in case it could be at all helpful. I hope all is well. Happy to continue our conversations at any point if it makes sense…”

Disarming language like “if it makes sense”, “in case it’s helpful”, “totally up to you” put them in a position of power and honor their autonomy to tune in to what’s right for them in that moment.

Overall, I’ve come to see that navigating the sales process is a lot like navigating a coaching relationship - it’s just a series of elegant invitations (or at least attemptedly elegant - if it's a flop, we adjust our posture and try something else or give space). I credit Jonah Richman for this concept of "sales as a series of invitations".

For cases where you might be wondering how to follow up with someone you haven't been in touch with in a long time, a very light ~9-word email can be enough to remind someone of their already latent desire or dormant need (if their desire is active and they simply forgot, or got busy, or something to that effect).

This is a technique Dean Jackson (famous marketer) talks about:

Hi {NAME},

“Are you still interested in _____?”

-{YOUR NAME}

I send these messages out periodically (sometimes email, sometimes text depending on the person), and I’m really not at all attached to the result, but every once in a while I’ll get a response.

I really don’t think this can be considered pushy or spammy if they haven't heard from you in a while and you've already established that they had an interest at one point.

Conclusion

If you're feeling stuck around following up with prospective clients, and you'd like some ideas on how you might go about it, feel free to shoot me a message here on Linkedin. I can usually fit a 30 minute complementary (non-salesy) coaching call into my schedule, and I enjoy helping folks with topics like this.

Ultimately, if these folks are needing help, and you know you're in a position to provide that help, providing elegant invitations and creating opportunities for them to draw upon your help can be a valuable service. We always want to respect the autonomy of our prospective clients to make the right decisions for themselves, but don't give up on them too soon! If you're rooted in your heart and coming from a place of genuine care, there's a decent chance that will come through to them at some point or another.