The Follow Up Strategy That Signs Clients on Repeat Even if You Hate Selling [Ep 96]

Hey, hey, welcome back to the Thriving Therapreneur Podcast. I'm your host Carly Hill, and I've been wanting to record this episode for a while now. This is a topic that comes up constantly in my DMs, in my coaching program, in conversation with other colleagues, coaches. They're talented, they're passionate, they're genuinely trying to help people, but this one thing that I'm gonna talk about today it is quietly costing them everything. What are we talking about, Carly? We're talking about sales. Specifically, we're gonna talk about why so many coaches and therapists think that selling is slimy, it's salesy, it's predatory. And if that's a belief that you hold, I promise you it is the single biggest thing standing between you and a thriving business. This episode, it might ruffle some feathers. It might challenge something you've been holding onto for a while, and that's exactly why I'm bringing it to the table. We have to go there. We have to have this conversation, and I wanna start with something a client said to me recently that actually inspired this whole entire episode. She told me she feels like she's poaching when she's reaching out to potential clients. Poaching, like she is some kind of predator stalking prey in the wild. And I want to address this head-on right now because I know she is not the only one who feels this way, because I hear versions of this all of the time. I don't want to be pushy. I don't want to be salesy. Sales is icky. I don't want to convince anyone. I don't want to come across as desperate. I don't wanna be annoying. Here's what I wanna say to all of that. If you are not willing to sell, you probably shouldn't be an entrepreneur. And I say that with full love and zero apology because making offers is literally how you make money in your business. Full stop, period, end of sentence. That's it. And if the idea of making an offer feels like poaching, like you are somehow doing something wrong to someone, we need to clear that up. We need to have a mindset shift because that mindset block, it is costing you clients, it is costing you income, and it's more importantly costing you the impact that you could have on the world. Every single day that you hold on to this belief that selling is slimy or you're poaching or whatever story you're telling yourself, You're holding yourself back. Now I do understand, and let's talk about where this salesy feeling actually comes from, because I think it's important to understand the root of it. Most people who think that sales is icky or slimy feel that way because of a bad experience they had being sold to at some point. We've all had it. Somebody pushed them into something. Somebody made them feel pressured or manipulated. And they decided, I never want to make someone else feel that way. And that's actually really beautiful, and that tells me you have integrity, and that tells me you care. And so don't make people feel that way. Do the exact opposite. Be the change that you wish to see in the world. But I also need you to understand that there's two completely different types of selling, and you might be confusing one for the other. Think about all of the things— just take a look around you wherever you are right now. All of the stuff you were either sold or purchased yourself without anybody selling it to you, and it didn't feel slimy. It actually felt good for you to buy that thing. That was a good selling experience. You're not giving that credit, right? The first type of sales, because we're talking about two, there's two completely different type of selling. The first type is slimy selling, which is convincing. And convincing is when you are trying to get somebody to do something for your own benefit, regardless of whether it's right for them. That is the pushy car salesman energy. That is the get-rich-quick schemes that you see online. That's yucky. That is not what you're doing. As a coach with integrity and ethics who is helping somebody make a major life transformation. The second type is what I call Sacred Soul Aligned Selling, and I've talked about this for years. It's in my book, it's in my coaching programs. I have clients message me all the time saying they're crying watching this training on Sacred Soul Aligned Selling. This is persuasion. Persuasion is helping somebody make a decision that they already want to make that is genuinely in their best interest. You're not pushing. You're simply guiding. You're simply presenting what's possible, and then you're letting them decide. You're extending an invitation. They're big girls, they're big boys. They can make the decision. But your job is to lay out all of the information so that they can make an informed decision. Convincing and persuasion are polar opposites. And when you understand that distinction, like really understand that distinction, selling's gonna stop feeling gross and it's gonna start feeling like the highest form of service that you can offer because it is. Selling is noble. It is service. Sales is sexy. Here's the truth. Sales isn't something that you do to somebody. It is something you do for and with somebody because you care. You are helping them get to transformation. You are helping them get to other side. You are helping them with solution. Back when I was a full-time therapist, there was nothing I dreaded more than facing a giant stack of paperwork by the end of the day. If you feel the same way, you're going to want to check out TherapyNotes. It's a complete practice management system with everything you need to manage patient records, schedule appointments, meet with patients remotely, create rich documentation, bill insurance right at your fingertips. My favorite part is their new AI tool, TherapyFuel, and it can also simplify client histories, document client communications, streamline insurance entry, and there's still still more to come. It's no wonder TherapyNotes is the leading behavioral health EHR. Find out yourself why thousands of therapists nationwide love it. Visit therapynotes.com and use code Carly to try it for free. So let's go back to the poaching thing for a second. When you reach out to somebody who is struggling, somebody who's been in a Facebook group posting about their problem, or they're actually looking for help recommendation. It's somebody who commented on your content, even asking for help. Somebody who downloaded your lead magnet and they're on your email list, maybe at midnight because they were desperately looking for a solution. And then you're going to offer a hand. You're going to extend an invite if it makes sense. You're not walking up to a stranger on the street screaming, buy my shit. You're saying, Hey, I see you. I hear you. I see that you're struggling. I have something that might help. No pressure, but I'd love to invite to share it with you. That's an act of service. That is leadership. And before you even extend an invitation to whatever it may be, typically it's something free at the beginning because again, we're not like Hey, I just met you. I see you're struggling. Buy my shit. It's just like dating, okay? You don't ask for a hand in marriage off rip. You even have to exchange phone numbers first. You have to go on dates probably for years. Then you move in together. Then you propose. It's the same thing. So extending an invitation is leadership. It is an act of service. Your potential clients, again, are big girls, big boys. They are fully capable of making their own decisions. They can say yes, they can say no. That's the beauty of it. You are not removing their agency. You are giving them an opportunity they may not have found on their own, and they're going to be so thankful for that. But when you hold back, when you don't make an offer, when you don't send the DM, when you don't follow up— oh my gosh, you don't follow up. So many people don't follow up. Fortune is in the follow-up. Then you're making the decision for them. When you say, and I see this all the time, well, I don't think that they're going to have the money to pay me. You're making the decision for them. You'd be really surprised how resourceful people will get when you have the solution to their problem. You're deciding for them that they don't need help, and that's actually a disservice. Think about this. If you had a solution that you could genuinely transform somebody's life and you stayed quiet about it because you were afraid of looking pushy, How does that serve them? It does not serve them. Withholding your gift is not humility. It is self-protection dressed up as consideration. And nobody's going to show up to your dinner party if they weren't invited. Nobody's coming to the birthday party if they weren't invited. All you're doing is simply making an invitation if it makes sense. That's the mindset shift. Let's talk about follow-up for a second because like I said, oh my gosh, so many of you are not following up. It's one of the most avoided parts of sales, especially for therapists and coaches who don't wanna feel like they're bothering people. But data doesn't lie. And majority of sales happen between the 7th and 12th touchpoint, the 7th to 12th. Most coaches, most entrepreneurs, they give up after the second follow-up, maybe even the first. They send one message, get no response, and they think, okay, there's no interest. I don't want to bother them. Then they wonder why they're not hitting their income goals, but they're literally sitting on millions of dollars in unrealized revenue because they stopped showing up too soon. The person who didn't respond to your DM last month, they're not ignoring you. They got busy. Life happened. They're silently lurking you. They don't trust you yet. They were already on 3 coaching calls that week and your message got buried. The problem they're struggling with didn't go away. They just got distracted, that's all. So your follow-up is not an inconvenience, it's actually a lifeline that they appreciate. And all you gotta do is a simple message like, hey, just wanted to check in, are you still looking for help with XYZ problem? I have something coming up I think might really serve you. That's it. No pitch, no pressure. You're just showing up. You're saying, hey, I still see you, I still care. You were on my mind. And I'm still here if you need me. The coaches who create consistent revenue are not the ones with the biggest following. They're not the ones that are just going viral all the time. They're the ones who care and didn't stop showing up. That's it. And so many of you say that you care and you're so passionate about what you're doing and you just want to help more people, but yet you don't want to reach out to people. How does that make sense? Maybe you don't care as much as you're saying you do. And again, I say that with love. Now I want to get practical for a minute because I think sometimes when people hear sell more, they don't actually know what that means in practice, in theory. So we're going to break that down because there are two ways to generate sales. Now that we talked about the two types of selling, the slimy selling and then the sacred soul aligned selling, Now we're gonna talk about two ways to generate sales. It's inbound and it's outbound. I teach both. I use both. Both are valid. Inbound is when people come to you, they're coming in, lead magnets, opt-in funnels, ManyChat automations, email list building, perhaps paid advertising. You're bringing people into your Facebook group or to your DMs. They are raising their hand first. They are saying, I want to hear from you. This is awesome. I love inbound. I recommend it. It feels really good when people are coming to you. Outbound is when you initiate, you find the person who needs you, you start the conversation, you extend the invitation. Both are necessary. What is absolutely not an option is doing neither. If you extend zero invitations, you make zero sales. Is just math. You need to know your numbers. How many conversations, how many calls, how many qualified leads do you need to hit your income goal? And then you work backwards from there. Most people think they have a problem with what they're actually saying in conversations when really they just have a volume problem and they're not having enough Conversations. I would recommend that you get your organic strategy working first. Get proof of concept, nail your messaging, and then you can put together your funnels and you can put dollars behind it and you can have a full inbound lead generation system where clients are flocking to you. But first, start the conversation, send the DM, follow up with people, make an offer. Oftentimes your first clients come from your warm network. You could straight up open your phone and probably text 10, 15 people right now. Friends, friends of friends, acquaintances. You could just post on social media that this is what you're doing now. You could simply make an offer. That's not poaching. That is service. That's the job. That's leadership. That's what you signed up for as an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs run businesses. Businesses are in business because they make money. How do they make money? They make sales. That's it. Guess what? A Therapist to Coach Startup School is back. If you have been sitting on the fence, this is your sign. We're spending 5 days together making sure you know exactly what you need to do to successfully expand into coaching. If you're feeling maxed out, maybe you're booked, maybe you have a cap on your income, you're sick of trading dollars for hours, This is for you. You genuinely love being a therapist, but you want more freedom, more flexibility, and more security in your life. Maybe you're already in your coaching business, but you're on this revenue rollercoaster and you can't seem to get consistent clients. I can help with that too. It's all happening May 11th through May 15th. Come spend 5 days with me. I'll be your business coach. We'll meet for about 90 minutes every evening, and you're going to get a full week of intensive business education broken down into digestible bites you can you can actually take action on. The legal stuff, the ethics of adding coaching, how to create and market a profitable program, how to choose the right audience, how to charge high-ticket rates, how to pick a niche that passes what I call the high-ticket test, and so much more. Stop talking about it, let's do the damn thing. Click the link in the show notes, and I can't wait to see you inside. One more thing before I wrap this up, because I know that this is also something that stops a lot of people from even making the right offer in the first place. And that's the fear of rejection. They're afraid of a no. And I need you to know that a no today is not a no for forever. A no is very normal and you will get nos. And the goal should be to get as many nos as possible because if you can reframe your mind and just say, I'm going to go after 20 nos, I guarantee you, you're going to get some yeses in there because it's going back to a volume game. A no really is an opportunity to plant a seed and build trust for the future. They're going to go into your pipeline for maybe later. Someone says no right now, that doesn't mean that they're not going to be ready in 3 months, especially if you freaking follow up with them. It doesn't mean that they aren't watching. It doesn't mean that they won't refer somebody to you in the next week. And honestly, sometimes the no has nothing to do with you or your offer at all. Most of the time it doesn't. It's timing, it's finances, it's life circumstances. And what I see too often is coaches pre-deciding the no for people. They don't make the offer 'cause they assume the person can't afford it. They don't follow up because they assume they're not gonna respond. Or they assume they're going to be annoying if they follow up. They don't invite somebody to a call because they assume the answer is going to be no or they're going to get ghosted. That is not discernment. That is your own money mindset, old money mindset, and insecurity being projected onto your ideal client. And you need a new operating system. That's why I said old, because you need to get a new one. Let's leave that one behind because it's costing you. You're not the judge of what someone else can or wants to invest in. Your job is to make the offer clearly and honestly and give them all the information they need, and then you let them decide. That's it. Rejection is part of this. Let's normalize it. Every single successful entrepreneur has a catalog of nos. The difference is they kept going anyway to where they also have a catalog of yeses. So let's recap. Selling is serving. When you share your offer, you are creating an opportunity for someone to change their life. That is so beautiful. You are building a bridge between where they are and where they want to be. They need you. You do what you do for a reason. Building that bridge is not predatory. It's not slimy. It's one of the most generous things that you can do with your gift. So just do me a favor and delete the word salesy from your vocabulary. And just replace it with service. Make the offers, send the DMs, do the follow-ups, run the inbound strategy, run the outbound strategy, do both, do what feels good to you. But you have to make invitations one way or another. You don't want to send the cold DMs because that's what you're referring to as salesy? Then don't. But you better bet that you need to have a really awesome inbound lead generation system that's gonna get people to your DMs. And even once they're in the DMs, cuz this is where a lot of people mess up, they don't follow up. They don't send invitations because the world doesn't need you to be a well-kept secret, guys. You gotta make the invitations. It needs you to be a well-known expert. And that all starts with you just being willing to show up and invite people in. So I'm gonna challenge you to do that. Go extend 100 invitations in the next 7 days and watch what happens. And I need you to come back, come find me on Instagram. I'm @carlyhillcoaching and be like, Carly, I accepted the challenge and I sent 100 invitations and this is what happened. Maybe you need to share this with somebody else too. If this episode hit something for you, I want you to do something right now, not later, right now. I want you to go leave a review. You also win a free course when you leave a review for me. You just need to submit proof on the podcast page. It's on carlyhillcoaching.com. And if you wanna go deeper on this, if you want the actual DM scripts, the conversation frameworks, the full strategy for turning conversations into consistent clients, you want the inbound system set up for you, just DM me the word 2026 on Instagram. Let's talk about what support looks like for you. My love is with you, and I'll see you in the next episode.