Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching podcast. I'm your host, Ellie Scarf, a senior executive coach with over 17, make that 18 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, which I now bring to my role as mentor and business coach to other executive coaches.
When it comes to coaching business, I have done it all. I've grown coaching businesses, solo and in partnership and with teams of coaches working with me. I've also been an in-house coach and I've been an associate coach. So when I talk about selling coaching to corporate clients, you know that I'm sharing from a place of experience and empathy and I've walked the talk.
I work with coaches now through my group coaching program, the Corporate to Coach Accelerator, where executive and leadership coaches grow their businesses with more corporate clients.
I'm also a mum, a big reader and an even bigger fan of my miniature Schnauzer Yoshi. Keep listening in for lots of practical tips, inspiring stories and prompts to help you grow your business your way.
Okay, so today I'm going to talk about follow-up, but in a slightly different way to how you might have heard me talk about it before.
Before I go on, I just want to be clear that follow-up is a hidden tool that most of us aren't tapping into anywhere near in the way that we could, because I think it is the closest thing to a golden ticket that we have and there are not many golden tickets in business, right?
Normally what we're doing is consistency, hard work and good strategy, right? And all of those things and mindset work, of course.
And normally those are the things that lead to the outcomes. Follow-up though is kind of magic, because we've done the work. We may have decided that there was no further outcome that we could get from that work that we've invested in terms of our business development, but follow-up is a way that we can get more upside out of the work we've already done.
So most coaches I see and work with spend so much time working on generating sales calls, getting proposals out there, having coffee catch-ups and look, a lot of them do turn into real opportunities and paid work.
But if you look at the results of your business development activities across a few time horizons, you'll see that there are different results. So there are a percentage of them that are going to become paid engagements pretty quickly, right? Those ones that you go to, you have the meeting, you send the proposal, they say yes and the offer goes, brilliant.
There are also a proportion that convert in the medium to long-term, right? So you keep talking, the opportunity may shift, but you know that it is working towards something and eventually it becomes a paid engagement.
There are also a percentage of people that you're talking to who will become clients, but they won't become clients unless you do something to give them an opportunity to take their vague but nonspecific interest and make it real.
So this time of year, and for anyone who is listening to this not during the week it was released, it is currently the last week of January in 2026.
So this time of year is what I think of as a golden window for follow-up, and we're getting to the end of the window to be honest. But it's a golden window because we have a really good reason to reach out to people for follow-up.
There's this new year, got a catch-up, might be increasing pricing, got some new offers, that is the energy we're bringing to follow-up at the moment, and there are loads of good reasons why you might want to do it.
The reason we do it from a business perspective is that it does a couple of things. It really sweeps up opportunities that are out there.
It generates more activity when we're usually in a phase where we need to kick-start that momentum, and it just is very much tied to practical outcomes. It's the one lever we can pull that could go from nothing to an opportunity in a very short amount of time.
So I'm going to share a few ways that you could use this time, this window, in fact this very weak, if you are game, how you can capture all of the opportunity that is sitting out there that you may have let slide.
Firstly though, I do need you to go through, before you can do any follow-up, I need you to go through your CRM or your marketing spreadsheet.
If you don't have those things, your calendar, your inbox, your LinkedIn messages, and I need you to co-late the list of all of the people that you either sent a proposal to, or met with, or had a coffee with, or talked about meeting with, but it didn't happen in 2025.
So take your time together with this list because the job is pretty easy once you have that list of people. And then once you have the list, I want you to work your way through the list and follow them up.
You know, of course if they have become clients then we put them into a different category, or if they're people you said no I don't want to work with them, different categories.
But anyone who has an opportunity that didn't have a time frame attached to it or didn't eventuate those are the people we're talking about. The strategy you use should be customized to that individual, but I want to give you a selection of ideas that you could use for this follow-up contact.
And I'm just going to list them. I've got eight, I think, but there are infinite numbers, but here's some examples to help you with a bit of thought starting.
So the first one is you might reach out to someone who has been working through, has had a big organizational change or big projects that they were working on when you met with them and nothing emerged. So you might say hey, John, I had a note to get in touch in the new year to see how things are going with the merger and how the integration of the new team is going.
Love to catch up if you have time for a coffee. So you had a note, so the key is there and you could use this in a different way. I have made a note to reach out in the New Year, and I wanted to check how you're going with this particular project that is relevant to the work that I do.
Now either of those could work, so you could just, you could even reach out and say hey, I had a note to catch up with you in the new year, how's it going? You could keep it that simple. And if it's someone that you don't know that well, or you didn't actually end up meeting with, I think it's good to keep a low ask in the outreach message, so you could just do that.
But if it's someone you met with and they had something big going on, it's a good opportunity to check in and say hey, I know that this was a priority, how did it go?
The second option is a sort of a subset of that and referring to what you actually spoke about when you asked them in the conversation about what was important to them, what was going on, what their priorities were. You might say hey, Steph, I know when we spoke last year you were looking at building a coaching program for your senior leaders, I know it was a really hectic time for everyone when we spoke, is this still a priority for you in 2026?
So really giving them a chance to say oh yeah, absolutely, but we haven't done anything with it, so let's talk. So giving them the opportunity to bring you back into the conversation.
The third opportunity, or the third way you could do it is something like hey, Mark, I know we spoke last year and there weren't any specific coaching needs that you have. I've just been working with a similar type of organization and they're doing some really interesting things to incorporate coaching into the culture of their business.
I'd love to catch up again to hear how you're going and to share what I've been learning if you've got some time. So what that one is doing is saying hey, we had a good conversation, there weren't any specific opportunities, but let me share a bit of social proof or some ideas that you might be interested in as like a thought starter, right?
And that's positioning you as a thought partner, which is really powerful in sales conversations. The fourth way you could do this is to say hey, Jenny, I was just doing some work with a similar type of organization with their middle leaders and I thought of you and our chat last year, should we catch up and check in on how things are progressing at your end? I can share what I've been observing.
So a bit similar to the last one, but it is really that I've been doing this and it made me think of you, that I thought of you, link is often really powerful to get people to say, oh, she's been thinking of me.
Yes, let's have a chat. And you can use the, I was thinking of your connection point in a few different ways.
You could say, hey, I read this article and I was thinking of you, any chance you'd be free for a coffee in the new year. So lots of different ways. So then we have number five, which is one that's more tied to a price increase, right? So you might reach out to someone and say, look, and obviously you would phrase this more politely, I'll be increasing prices for 2026 shortly.
I just wanted to reach out to you as I know you were interested, but there are a few questions you had in 2025 around this engagement. I didn't want to increase prices without giving you a chance to lock in at those existing rates before I do so. So that's really good to go back to people you've given indicative pricing, people you've given a proposal, things like that.
And that is a really interesting good way to reconnect and a good way to have a bit of urgency. I would say that is particularly powerful if you're working with individual clients, but it does work with organizations as well.
The next one, actually, I'm adding one in on the fly. Another one you might want to think about is related to your capacity, right? And so what I find a good reason, a good way to reach out is to say, look, I'm just booking in Q1 is looking fairly booked, but I'm booking in clients now for particularly for workshops or could say for coaching, whatever you want to,
I'm looking at booking clients into Q2 and Q3 for those longer term engagements. And I wanted to just see if there was what was on your horizon, make sure that if you were interested in proceeding as per our conversation that we could make sure that's in the diary.
So that is a good opportunity as well, particularly for people who fell off the radar. So you might have been keen and then who disappeared or ghosted you. And so that one together with the price increase, those ones are a little more, there's a little more urgency, there's a little more limited scarcity to what's available. So I would use those for people who like to make a choice or maybe this is not for you to give them an opportunity to say yes and to get focused.
Another opportunity is to share a resource. I think I mentioned that one already.You could share a new offer is another way. So connecting and saying, hey, it was great to connect in 2025.
I just wanted to reach out as in 2026, I'll be adding this to my suite of offers or have this new thing available. And so you just wanted to reach out and see if that was anything.
It was, I wanted to share that with you. Not sure if it's relevant, but would love to have a chat in any regards. And then the other reason you can reach out is if that person you have been speaking to has changed roles, right? Or if they're different organizations, you can reach out and say, hey, I was just, I had it in my, I know it in my diary to catch up.
But I noticed that you've had some big changes. I'd love to catch up. Let's have a coffee. So things like that. So now, none of those are what you have to do.
The main point is that you go back and you reconnect with all of these people and you follow up with them so that you are really mopping up people who are interested, but who didn't have any urgency in 2025. And you give them a chance to reengage with you.
It may be that you reach out with completely different ideas. And that is great. I don't care what reason you use so long as it makes sense, given your connection. And it is you reaching out.
Now they always say the funds are in the follow up or the fortune is in the follow up. And I believe very, very sincerely in that. And I know from the people inside the accelerator who are going through this process that it works.
So I really encourage you to do this. So then make sure that moving forward, you diarise your follow ups if you haven't already done that. Now, one idea for how you can do that is to have a sort of a weekly follow up work block.
It might be half an hour that you have in your diary every week as a repeating meeting with yourself. And then as you as you have a meeting with someone and you want to say, yeah, I need to make sure that I follow them up in two weeks or a month or three months, depending on the stage of the buying cycle, you just pop their name in that work block in the notes of that week.
And then when you get to that week, you're ready to go. Now you can do that in much more automated ways. If you have a CRM, you can use a spreadsheet, you can use a task manager lots of different ways, but having the weekly work block where you actually do it is really powerful. So I hope that this episode helps give you some ideas.
And I promise there are opportunities that you will be missing out on if you don't have your follow up locked in. This is a great time to do it as we get back into the 20th year. And please do connect with me on LinkedIn if we haven't already. And let me know how you go with your follow up. And of course, as always, if you would like more intensive and hands-on coaching and mentorship to support you as you grow your executive and leadership coaching business, book a call with me.
And let's figure out if my program, the corporate to coach accelerator, is a good fit for you to help you with that growth. You can get all the details on the program over at http://elliescarf.com/cca. And you can book a call with me at http://elliescarf.com/bookacall Of course, all those links are also in the show notes. See you next week.
