75: Following Up with Prospects After the Uncomfortable Silence

Ever have an amazing pitch (in your opinion), but your potential client has not said one word? Today, we’re talking about following up with clients, less annoyingly.

Just know that pitching is something you have to do and you will also get a lot of pitches out. Sometimes you’ll get 1 or 2 great clients because it’s just how following up works.

Let’s talk about first that exciting feeling you get when you’re ready to start a project, ready to get more clients, and ready to start your health writing business.

So you just want to follow up quickly. Like when you send out a cold pitch and you wanna follow up even the next day because you’re sitting there an hour waiting for their reply and maybe no response yet. But you have to relax because these content directors and content managers have a lot on their plate but unfortunately, you’re not their number one priority. So, you have to wait for at least 3 to 4 business days, which means don’t send a pitch on a Friday and follow up on a Monday.

Also when you send a pitch you have to have some sort of call to action, meaning do what you want your reader to do. Like, do you want them just to reply to say they are interested? Or applying saying no thanks and that’s still ok. You’d rather know that they’re not interested than keep following up and following up and not hearing anything from them because in your head there is still a potential.

Following Up Can Be Easy Using Some Tools in Gmail!

• Boomerang – a very great tool because you can be reminded of the follow-ups. For instance, you send 10 pitches on Monday, then it boomerangs it on Thursday.  Like it comes back to your inbox saying “Hey do you want to follow up on this?”, it’s great because you don’t have to remember to follow up all the time.
• I do recommend using some sort of spreadsheet or template.

In The Savvy Scribe Collective Group, as well as in courses, I’ve shared a pitch template that you can use. It documents the clients, the email addresses that you’re using, and maybe you’re using 2 different kinds of pitch templates in your email. The cool thing about Gmail is you can save different templates, and you can kinda split test it to see which pitches are working. So, try different tactics when following up.

The biggest takeaway I want you guys to do is to pitch pitch pitch pitch pitch pitch but don’t forget that following up may pay off.

Have a great day and go get your write on!