Fiona Johnson
Tell me, do you follow up your proposals more than once? Rather than spending all of your energy, bringing your leads in, running discovery calls and sending out proposals just to leave them there in the dust. What we wanna do is actively and proactively follow up our proposals. You don't want to badger people, and I don't recommend sending more than one or two emails a week.
Intro
If we want to be able to tip the scales towards the favor of marginalized people, we need to understand the secrets to making money in small business. The more we talk about money and the secrets that usually stay at the golf club, the more likely we are to be able to make money. My mission is to get more money into the hands of. Good people, specifically good business people like you. This is Money Secrets, the place to learn about the money secrets of successful small business owners. Let's go. [00:01:00]
Acknowledgement of Country
This podcast episode was recorded on the lands of the Warri people of the KO nation, and I'd like to acknowledge them as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and water that I live, work, and play on. I'd like to pay respects to elders both past and present. And note that sovereignty has never been seated. This always was and always will be. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land.
Hey there, small business owner. It's V here, your resident money coach and business strategist and the host of the Money Secrets podcast. I'm guessing you already knew that because. You are listening to an episode of the Money Secrets podcast, but if this is the first time I've met, now, we've been introduced, I'm fee and I am obsessed with small business and using business as a force for good.
I hope that's something that you are interested in too, and if so, I've got [00:02:00] so much to share with you and thank you for being here. This episode is the fourth episode in a four-part series called The Sales Sprint. It's inspired by a mini program that I developed inside Good Money Club in October, 2025, where I took my members through a series of training and co-working sessions where we actually worked on our sales process together.
Episode number one was about how to bring the right client into your universe. The second episode was about how to run a discovery call. It's so, such a key activity for a service provider, and it's something that we just don't talk about very much. The third episode was around how to actually write proposals that get people wanting to say yes, and this episode is about how to follow up a proposal.
Now maybe you are thinking, Hmm, how is Fee going to make a whole [00:03:00] episode about following up a proposal? Don't you just send out a proposal, follow it up once, and then just bury your head in the sand and delete and decide. If they never got back to me, then they definitely don't wanna work with me. And now I hate everything and I'm feeling cringe and I don't know what to do, and I just wanna wrap myself in a dune.
And I'm embarrassed because that client never got back to me. Is that you? If so, it's really common. Lots of people think like that about their proposals. So what happens is. We send our proposal out to this lead or this potential client, and we are feeling really excited about it, especially after the discovery call.
If it went really well, we've then put all of this effort into putting together this amazing proposal. We've sent it out. We are so excited. We are feeling good, and then nothing crickets. They don't get back to you. [00:04:00] And what often happens is that we go into a self-sabotage mode where we start second guessing and doubting everything about our business, our service, our product, that particular client, and we start kind of burrowing ourselves into a whole.
Now, what I want you to consider instead is that we actually need a plan to follow up that proposal. And ideally what we wanna do is actually pre-plan and pre-write how we are going to follow that proposal up. Now this episode is inspired by Renee Wallace from Cultivate Assembly, who is one of my good Money club members.
She has a mini training, which is called How to Create a Post Proposal Email Sequence. Yes, it's very niche. It's an amazing piece of training. She's delivered it inside Good Money Club, and it is awesome. [00:05:00] Highly recommend you go and check out Renee from Cultivate Assembly if you want to get more training on this topic.
But what I see in my one-on-one and Good Money Club clients is that we actually just don't follow up proposals anywhere near enough time. So we need to be thinking about how am I actually going to get a response from this person Now? There's a lot that you can do in the lead up to and on the discovery call and in sending the proposal, and we have a lot more training around this inside Good Money Club.
Hint hint, you should go and check it out via the link in the show notes because we will be opening the Doors to Good Money Club from new members fairly soon. So let's talk about how to follow up the proposal. First of all, you need to make sure that you send the proposal out [00:06:00] promptly. There's nothing worse than having a great discovery call with someone, and then the proposal takes one or two weeks to come out.
Right? So we wanna be organized and proactive with sending out proposals. The longest that you would want it to take would be a week, and if it was going to take a week, you need to tell the person on the discovery call that it is going to take you a week to get it to them because X, Y, and Z. Okay? Once we've sent the proposal, then we need to actually have a plan for how we are going to follow up.
So we wanna think about what are the reasons why the person may not have decided. Or said Yes yet, and then we wanna speak to that. The first thing to say is that you actually want to draft or write these emails or these notes when you are feeling really good. We don't wanna start writing these emails or these follow ups [00:07:00] when we've gone into the spiral of after sending the proposal and they haven't gotten back to me.
Okay. So do yourself a favor and do this when you are feeling really good. Okay? But do it even if you're not feeling good. But ideally, you wanna write these emails and these follow-ups when you are feeling really good. The other thing that we wanna avoid is multiple follow-ups that are just the same thing.
Hey, Jane, really loved our call last week. Just wondering if you're gonna be going ahead and then a week later, hey Jane, just following up again to see how you're going another week later. Hi Jane, following up again. Just wondering how you're going. That's annoying for Jane. So what we wanna do is make sure that when we are following up, after sending out a proposal, that we have different follow ups.
So we want to think about what are the different pieces of information [00:08:00] that this person needs to know in order to say yes. Let's assume positive intent. Let's assume that the person does want to work with you, but there's just a few things that they need to either sort through or be answered by you in order to get them to a yes.
The first thing is that you want to start with a follow-up that's just, hey. Do you have any questions about what I've sent through to you? If so, would love to, um, to know what they are so that I can, you know, help the next call or email might be something like, Hey, I've been thinking about your project.
Would you be open to jumping on a call this week to chat through it? If you don't get a response to that, you might say something in your next correspondence like. Hey Jane. Lots of my past clients that I've worked with in the past were worried about blah, blah, blah, before working with me, and now this is what life looks like for [00:09:00] them.
They tell me all the time that they wish they had started sooner, and I wanted to let you know that that's the experience most people have just in case. That's where you are right now. The next response if you don't hear back, might be something like. A case study or some kind of story about your clients, and it's really important to get the subject line really popping.
You want people to open the email. If they don't open the email. It doesn't matter what's written in the email. So thinking about your subject lines as, how would I get somebody to actually open this email? So it might be that you share a case study. It might be that you share a story about one of your clients, something like that.
Maybe the next follow up might be trying to speak to a specific pain point. It might be something like, are you dealing with blah, blah, blah? Or maybe you've been dreaming about the [00:10:00] solution, blah, blah, blah. The sooner we get started, the sooner we can get you towards this solution, and I'm really excited about doing that with you.
Right. So these are just some examples of things that you might say in your follow ups. Another thing that you might say is you might say, Hey, I saw this on my walk this morning and it made me think of you and your project. I hope this makes you smile. Something like that. So we wanna give different reasons for following up, and we want to always give the potential client a shame-free way of responding.
We don't want them to get to a point where they feel bad or sad or embarrassed or ashamed that they haven't responded yet. You always wanna keep the loop open so that there's a a really fun way for them to reconnect back with you, even if it's been four or six or eight weeks since the proposal. You wanna round out your proposal follow [00:11:00] ups, so depending on you, your process and your clients, you might stop following them up after.
Eight weeks or six months or 12 months, depending on what your sales cycle looks like. And in that last email, you actually want to let them know that you are going to stop chasing up about this particular proposal. So you might say something like, thank you so much for the chance to work with you, and I really hope you get that solution you are looking for.
I'll reach out again in six months to see how things are for you, and in the meantime, I hope everything is great with you. So you wanna give it a sort of rounding out so that they know, okay, this is the last time that fee's going to follow up. But you also wanna open the loop for future correspondence.
Okay, so the way that you follow up your proposals will be different from how I do or how others do, but I want you to think about how can I actually [00:12:00] follow up with something different each time, rather than just following up with the same message each time, which let's face it, can get really annoying.
You wanna think about the reasons why that person hasn't said yes yet? Have they been too busy? Is there something that you haven't actually shared with them? Have you not actually explained the value or the transformational or the outcome that they're likely to have? Have you made it seem like you have unlimited availability and they can just get back to you whenever they feel like it?
Or are you actually letting them know that you have limited availability? And that if they would like to work with you, this is how they can do that by such and such a date. So we want to have a plan to follow up anywhere between three and perhaps 12 times. Really depends on your clients and your process and [00:13:00] how big that lead is.
Most people only follow up between one and three times, but what if the fourth time you followed up was when you got a yes. What if the seventh time you followed up, you actually told them what they needed to hear in order to go forward? If it's a really big project and it's a long lead time, what if the 12th email was the one that actually got them over the line?
So rather than spending all of your energy, bringing your clients in or your leads in. Running discovery calls and sending out proposals just to leave them there in the dust. What we wanna do is actively and proactively follow up our proposals. You don't want to badger people, and I don't recommend sending more than one or two emails a week.
Definitely in the first week, you could send two and beyond that, you probably don't wanna send more than one email [00:14:00] a week. Again, totally up to you and how you wanna do things. But tell me, do you follow up your proposals more than once? And if you are somebody who hasn't been following up your proposals, maybe that's something that you could change.
What you could do is jump into the show notes and have a look for the Sales Sprint workbook, which you can go and download for free. That is gonna help you work through the four lessons that I've taken you through in this four part series, how to bring in the Right Clients, number one. Number two, how to run your discovery calls.
Number three, what to include in a proposal, and number four, how to follow up a proposal. I can guarantee that most of the people listening to this podcast don't follow up anywhere near enough. So let's remove the shame, embarrassment, and lack of action around following up [00:15:00] proposals and let's follow them up.
You just never know whether it's the third, the seventh, or the 12th follow up that actually gets somebody over the line. And remember that the sales process is about relationship building. It's not about getting to one outcome, it's about developing a relationship, a rapport, respect, and a, some kind of friendship depending on you and your client, rather than just thinking about it as being outcome based.
I really hope this four part series has been helpful for you and that especially if you are a service provider, that it helps you to actually make your sales process more effective. If this is something that you have gone through, I'd love to hear from you. You can go to the Money Secrets podcast Instagram handle and send me a message.
And if you have enjoyed going through the Sales Sprint workbook with me, you will love. Good Money Club. This is just scratching the surface of [00:16:00] what we do in Good Money Club. It is a six month program where you get to have direct access to me every single week to ask your questions, stay accountable to your goals.
I absolutely love on my members and I keep them accountable to the goals that they want to achieve. So if that sounds like something you're interested in, I'd love to hear from you. You can go and check out Good Money Club via the link in my show notes and find out about whether it might be for you. We do intakes at least a couple of times a year, and yeah, the best way to find out when we are next opening our doors is to join the wait list, so maybe I'll see you inside Good Money Club someday.
And, uh, either way, I will see you again on the Money Secrets Podcast next week.
Thanks for being with me.
Outro
Thank you so much for listening right up to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Money Secrets, [00:17:00] where we talk about the money secrets of successful small business owners. If you enjoyed the episode, I'd love it if you subscribe to the podcast.
But leave us a review or share this episode with one of your friends. I hope you learned something. I hope you got a new perspective, and I really hope you enjoyed the listening experience.
