If you're a therapist or a coach and you're running your business, you're probably familiar with the frustration that comes with potential clients who reach out and then just disappear. The truth is that not every person who's reaching out is actually going to work with you, or anyone else for that matter, in the near future. Today I'll be sharing 3 tips to save you precious time when it comes to dealing with potential clients who would never work with you in the first place. If you'd like to brainstorm a game plan together for your business you can schedule a free strategy call with us here: http://bit.ly/practicegameplan
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About the 6-Figure Practice Program:
The Six Figure Practice with Sasha Raskin, is an online program and community for helpers such as counselors and coaches, who are building their private practice. If you’re looking for a clear, step-by-step road map for creating and marketing your private practice, you're at the right place!
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About me:
My name is Sasha Raskin. I’m a Number 1 Best Selling Co-Author in 12 Countries, a Doctoral student in Counseling Education and Supervision, a coach, a psychotherapist and an adjunct faculty at a graduate counseling program at Naropa University.
One of the things I’m enjoying the most is helping other therapists and coaches build their successful private practice so that they could actually help the clients they were taught to help, and thrive themselves. I’m almost always fully booked, so my ability to work with individuals is limited. That is why I’ve created this program to deliver powerful results and create a community where you will feel supported by each other!
This program's primary goal is to help you build a thriving private practice, in a fun and authentic way. Counselors and coaches invest an incredible amount of time, money, and effort into building their helping skills. However, when their training ends, they usually find themselves lacking the business skills that are needed to start and run a successful private practice, feel isolated, discouraged and not knowing where to start.
I believe that to be truly helpful to others, therapists and coaches have to learn to thrive themselves and definitely know how to get clients whom they can help.
This is where this program comes in. If you're willing to learn and work hard, a 6-figure private practice is within your reach in a year - 2 years. This program will give you a clear outline, and detailed instructions on how to get there.
3 Ways To Stop Wasting Your Time With Not-Committed Potential Clients
Hello, hello. This is Sasha Raskin from the 6 figure practice. So I know I've been absent for the last week. And the thing is as you probably know I committed to doing those Facebook lives every day, five days a week. And the reason I missed those are because I got in the frenzy of house buying and the market right now is pretty crazy. So I just decided to slow down and make small decisions not from a place of pressure or stress.
So I'm back. The reason why I'm doing those daily Facebook lives is because my mission is to help as many coaches and therapists to fill their practice. So if you can help as many clients as you can I'm in a way helping your clients through you. So that's my goal.
Today I want to talk about three ways you can stop wasting your time with non-committed potential clients. So if you're a therapist or a coach and you're running your own business, you are probably familiar with this frustrating feeling of, for example, a client reached out to you, a potential client, and they seem to be very interesting on their email and you really want to help, you write an email back, you try to schedule a time, maybe you even schedule a time and then they disappear. Crickets, nothing is happening. Or think about those consultation calls where you been waiting for a client and they just never appear.
I don't know, at the beginning when this was happening to me before I found some really good solutions to that I felt pretty honestly frustrated and a little bit angry with those potential clients, and I don't want to be angry with my potential clients. And honestly, I don't want to be wasting my time either, especially when you're running your private practice there are so many things you could be doing both marketing-wise and building your private practice and actually helping people, and it's just frustrating to spend your time waiting for people to show up that don't and not respecting your time. So we'll figure out some ways to stop wasting your precious time on people who will probably never work with you or potentially with any other coach or a therapist any time soon. So we'll know how to identify them and we'll know what to do about that.
So in the 6 figure practice program we talk about the triangle of running your business, the three pillars of a thriving practice, which is if you think about this triangle would be operations, marketing and sales, right? The three pillars you have to have to have a successful business consistently. So what we're talking about today is part of the operations part, what is not a part of your clinical work or selling your practice, selling your services.
And the more you can make that part efficient, the happier you will be because then you able to go your practice fast and not deal with manual labor so much. So the main way of stopping wasting your time with not committed potential clients is not to work with them in the first place.
What do I mean by that? A lot of times you can actually prevent people from reaching out to you if they're not ready to work with you. So it sounds counterintuitive, especially when you're just starting out, you're probably thinking, "Well, I just want to first of all help as many people as possible, then I want as many people as possible to reach out to me because it increases my chances of working with more clients." And you have a problem with that approach because you are kept with the free time that you have.
Now how do you solve it? First of all you stop scheduling consultation calls through emails. What do I mean by that? Not completely sending emails but stop the manual labor of offering specific times to have consultation calls with you. Basically automating that part completely and switching to online schedule for your consultation calls. So first of all you are using a software to replace your manual labor with, a small subscription maybe 10 bucks a month, right? So you're saving a lot of time. By itself this is very helpful.
And second by using a scheduler you can do three main things that will really help you save time. First of all instead of emailing back and forth with times, what I do is I say something like this - Hey, thank you so much for reaching out. I'd love to schedule a 20 minutes free consultation call with you. Please choose a time that works for you here and link to my scheduler, right? First of all it takes me just, well, honestly 20 seconds because I have that text copy/paste ready in Google Keep, so I'm able also to respond very quickly to potential clients which is great and highly increases the chances that they will work with you. And it puts a little bit more work on them to go ahead and schedule the time versus just kind of passively choosing the times that you chose for them.
So in a way just like you don't want to work harder than your client in the sessions you don't want to work harder than them in, well, let's call it what it is, selling your services. So just the fact that the people that actually do go ahead and take the action of scheduling a consultation call with you for your online scheduler which will require some effort is actually it will increase the chances that they will be more committed clients in the first place.
Now also let's talk for a second about saving your time, it will generate if you do your work right and if you, for example, if you do your consultation calls via Zoom which I highly recommend you can connect your Zoom to your scheduler so it would auto generate a Zoom link for them, it would add it to the calendar. And when you write confirmation email and at least two reminder emails, and I highly recommend the text reminder one hour before consultation call, you actually increase the chances that they will show up to a call as well. So that's tip number one, and I guess it has some bullet points in there.
Tip number two, it can sound like such a small thing but it changed everything for me, I just at the end of my questionnaire that I'll talk about in a moment in the online scheduler I added a tick box. I've never seen it anywhere, I just had this thought of, "Okay, I think that the potential clients that schedule consultation calls they're not very much aware of the fact that if I'm scheduling time with them this is a time that I'm not being paid for that I could be paid for when working with paying clients," right? I'm not just sitting on my butt all day in the office waiting for people to call, right? This time is precious.
So I added the tick box that is required for them to actually book the call which says something like I realized that Sasha puts this time away from me and I commit to cancel, reschedule the consultation call within 48 hours in advance at least and to show up on the call, right? So of course, people can still forget to show up or the last moment or something comes up or it's not their main priority, but since I added that my no shows to my consultation calls really diminished. I think maybe for the last half a year I can't recall even one no show honestly to a consultation call, because it plants the seed of awareness.
Hi, Rakib. I'm in Boulder, Colorado. Thanks for asking. By the way, if you're listening to this on Spotify or Apple podcast it's a recoding that I'm doing going live on Facebook and Instagram.
So this is tip number two - add this tick box, it will change everything.
Now number three, in the consultation call scheduler I added a few questions. Of course, it's very helpful to have that information ahead of time such as why are you reaching out, how did you hear about me, etcetera. But there is additional benefit to adding a few questions. Again, counterintuitive. Of course, you want to make it easier for your clients to schedule a call with you, just let's get on the phone or on the Zoom call and then talk about it. No, you actually need it to be a little difficult for them to schedule a call with you by taking effort, making an effort to do so, right? So the people who would actually answer those questions they will already be more committed to working with you. And definitely more committed to at least showing up to the consultation call.
Also you can really get a sense of their commitment level to actually do therapy or coaching at this time in their lives from their answers, right? I can predict with a high degree of certainty that people who answered three words answers to my questions probably will not become my clients. I think just in a very symbolic way it's a testament to the commitment of them being ready to do some work. And you probably know that coaching and therapy requires work on your clients, right? Not everyone is ready.
And yes, even people who are looking for therapy and coaching there are window shoppers, people who are thinking maybe it's a good time or a good idea to do therapy or coaching at this time but they might do some research, maybe reach out to a few people but when the time comes to actually doing the work they might put it off for tomorrow. Nothing wrong with that, it's just to clarify that when kind of people disappear and don't show for a consultation call or don't answer an email after you send them a few times, not necessarily you "lost" them to a competitor of yours, maybe they're just not ready to do therapy or coaching. And by adding those three things, those three tips, you can actually decrease your time spent on people you will never work with.
Quick two bonus tips. No follow-ups after, if you're sending a summary email, that's something I'm doing about our consultation call, I don't follow up. If someone is excited to work together, great, they will do the work and they will follow up with me if they said they need time to think about it.
Bonus tip number two, if they did say they need time to think about it, great, I asked them, "Can you let me know within the next two days?" Put a deadline on it and also it kind of lets them know that there is some expectation and at least as a courtesy to you who spend time with them on a consolidation call, the least they can do is to let you know where they're at.
I hope it's been helpful. Go to the6figurepractice.com, there are endless free resources out there. And I'll see you on the next live.
