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Did I ever tell you about the time I basically assaulted a prospective client with a horrifying amount of Checking in emails?
Talk about thirsty… 🤦🏻♂️
But then I got a nearly-instant reply from this person by switching my approach from me-me-me to her-her-her.
Get your popcorn ready. That’s the story I’m sharing today. Feel free to laugh at my expense.
First, I want to let you know about a free workshop I’m running for service providers. You’ll learn how to use productized offers to:
Attract qualified prospects (who are 80% sold)
Shorten your sales cycles
Maximize your win rates
Earn passive revenue
See ya there.
🤝 Do you know a consultant, agency owner, or coach? Forward this email to them, or share the event link.
Where were we?..
Ah, I was just about to fill you in on the time I was the most desperate business owner ever.
Right, so it’s sometime in early 2023. You know, that weird time when every full-time employee from every company was being laid off? Quiet-quitting was also still operating full throttle. What a time to be alive!
Translation: Not only were my clients operating with reduced staff, but they had mandatory budget freezes. All of the relationships… all of the consulting and training opportunities I had worked tirelessly to prospect, pitch, and win; evaporated overnight.
Over the coming weeks, my frustration morphed into all-out panic. I threw away most of my rules about finding and winning business deals. This was now a game of survival.
I was spamming reaching out to friends, past clients, warm leads (now cold leads or jobless), and posting like crazy on social. My company newsletter also went from relational and valuable to transactional and slimy.
One of many prospects that received a flurry of my thirsty sales emails was a past client. She had hired my company a couple years ago.
She replied to my first email. She didn’t have any current needs and let me down easy: “Let’s touch base later in the year in the event our budget re-opens.”
I hounded her over the next 4 months. It was wildly uncomfortable for me, but felt like my only option.
The apparent hopelessness within my emails spiraled. From “Just checking in…” to “Following up…” to “Have space for 2 more clients…” (a lie) to “Still interested?”
In the meantime, I had to let go of my tiny team. Painful, but I’d rather they found steady income elsewhere than wait it out with me.
Things were dire.
A reason to reach out
With my 13-year-old company on the brink and already applying for full-time jobs, I “woke up” early one morning. (Woke up is in quotes because I’d have had to be sleeping during these gut-wrenching times in order to actually wake up.)
I stirred in bed, remembering an unrelenting mantra of an old business coach:
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