How to Follow Up The Right Way With Lapsed Clients - Shorty EP #094

G' day guys. Welcome to this week's Call.

Podcast. Just come off a call. It's Tuesday 2nd June.

Week 23 of 2020. I It just seems to me that only, only recently it was Christmas and now we're in June. It's crazy. I don't know why the year is flying by. So.

Sure we're all going to be quite pleased when we're through this, this period of unsettled disruption on the planet.

Hope you're all safe wherever you are. Lots of unusual activity on our planet at the minute. Lots of disruption, lots of changes. But what I wanted to focus on today guys, was really coming out of the back of COVID you know, things are starting to ease and now is a really good time to be connecting and reconnecting with lapsed clients and engaging with them. So I wanted to talk a bit today about the importance of actually getting on the phone and calling people. It's just not enough to send emails and say, hey, we're here if you need us. And the second thing I want to talk about is the fact that virtually every business I talk to simply doesn't call enough people or calls four or five people and then thinks that, you know, no one's interested in buying the service.

Only three in every hundred people are actually ready to buy what it is you've got to sell. Which means really basically 1 in 33 people. So if you're not talking to 30 or 40 people at a time, it's unlikely you're going to convert anyone into doing some business with you. And I think that's a really important thing to remember. But I also know that the idea of getting on the phone to clients can be a little bit daunting, it can be a little bit intimidating. And so what typically happens is the thought of calling clients, you know, kind of puts us off and we send an email instead. So what I've done is I've actually created some, some sales training, some, some follow up training for reconnecting with laps clients and I've made it available for free on my website under my resources, my free resources tab. So you can go to dan lenny.com free-resources and actually watch this training. You don't even have to opt in. The training video is about 25 minutes long and it's free on the page. Now if you also want, you can, you can download a script that I've created and I want to just talk to you a bit about why I think this will help you. So you know, to keep your business going to make your business thrive, you've got to build consistency. You've got to get to a point where you are actively, you know.

You know, building systems, building consistency, building things that will help you to.

You know, maintain that, that consistency. You know, oftentimes.

You probably haven't got any stability in your business. It's probably unreliable, it might be unpredictable. And what you need it to be is stable, reliable and predictable. And the way you do that is by creating stability in your business, stability in your financial life so you can provide for your family and have the confidence that you're going to be able to continue to do that. And so the thing that solves most problems is cash. And by cash, I mean when you make sales and people pay you, you can generate enough money to hire other people to do the things that you don't want to do. And so what's really important is that you learn how to sell. And one of the things, the things that I think always puts filmmakers off and video production people off is the idea of selling as being sleazy and salesy. But think of selling as serving. If you think of selling as serving and think of the fact that your.

Market has a need for a product or service and you have the skills to help them achieve that, you're actually doing the market a disservice by not making sure they fully understand the value of your product and services. And so in order to do that properly, you have to be clear.

On how to approach lapsed clients particularly. And I say lapsed clients because those are the easiest to sell to because they've already bought from you in the past. So this script template.

Is in 5 parts and I think what certainly will, I think, help you and what I certainly found to be a struggle in the early days of selling was not knowing what to say and how to get to the meat and potatoes. So I've created this follow up script template so you can connect with an existing client. And the important thing is to get, to get ready for the call. You know, be, make sure you're in a quiet room, make sure you've got a pen and notepad in front of you and use a headset so you can use, you know, gestures and take notes. And you want to start with some, some small talk. You want to start with like, hey, you know, you know, hey Bob, it's Deb here from the Video Business accelerator.

How are you? You know, what's happening in your world today? And then, and then you want to kind of wait for a response and then you want to kind of state the reason for a call and take the lead and actually say, I'm sorry, I've not been in touch for a while and give a reason.

And then you know, the reason for my call today is. And then you want to state why you're calling. And in this, this, this downloadable document, I've got some examples of what you can say and how to say it. In part three, you want to test the relationship, which is, you know, you're asking very specific questions to gauge how strong the connection is with the client and yourself, despite the fact you might have not worked together for a while. And the responses to those questions will help you to understand if there's an opportunity to support them going forward.

And then you want to, part four is you want to identify their current situation, understand what's going on for them now, where is video fitting into that plan? And also there's an opportunity for you to share some insights with them for things that perhaps you've been working on and things that you can do to offer some additional value. And there's also where you can ask them, really kind of, it's a very clever way of asking a question that has you reach out and have them.

You know, kind of tell you if they're going to need video in the next few months without you saying, hey, do you need video in the next few months? So we've got some clever questions and some tactics in there. And I say tactics, but ethical tactics to kind of extract information in a way that doesn't seem like you're being pushy or salesy. And then part five, you wrap it up and you, you position your future value and you position a kind of a reason to re engage and an opportunity to perhaps take another call from you.

So if you want to access this, it's over at my website, dan lenny.com free resources. You'll see the tab on the homepage, it's completely free and I encourage you to go over there. There's an introduction video. Then we've got a kind of, really quite a, kind of a decent sort of training there on, on how to approach this, what to say, where the call fits in. I talk about my three call strategy and it's got all completely for free. I just wanted to give you something tangible that you can get your teeth into as a listener to this podcast, as a subscriber. And if you're not subscribed yet, please do subscribe. That would be really great to help you get back on your feet. To get on the phone and connecting with people. I find that, you know, sometimes when we get a bit anxious or nervous about doing something that we're not comfortable with, we just don't do it. But in order for you to scale your business and to grow, you're going to have to get on the phone and actually connect with people. So I wanted to make a script for you and give you a roadmap to do that, just as a thank you for being a listener. So I want to encourage you to go over and do that now and let me know, you know, how you get on with it. You go and watch the training, download this follow up script and.

You know, let me know. Connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know how you get on with it. I'd love to hear how you go and I will see you again on Thursday.

You've been listening to the how to Scale a Video Business podcast with me, your host, Dan Lenny. If you're a video business owner who's hit a ceiling and we benefit from mentorship, support and coaching, then check out how you can work with me over@denleny.com don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on itunes and we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review. And don't forget to share. If you feel you've gotten value from this episode and you think it would be useful for other filmmakers you know, then please do me a massive favor and share it on social media and in groups that you might be in. See you next week.