Where 15 of your clients are hiding
Let me tell you about two firms. Both ran a series of workshops over the winter, December through March. Both planned them well. Both drew a good crowd, 25 to 30 people a session. Both gave a solid presentation, answered real questions, and booked appointments right there in the room. Workshops do that. It’s exactly why you host them.
But here’s the thing about any room of 30 families. A good number book on the spot, and some are interested but not ready to act yet. Their parents are still healthy. The crisis hasn’t hit. They came to learn, they’re glad they did, and they walk out meaning to call you “soon.”
That group is where the two firms went in completely different directions.
Firm A sent a thank-you email the week after each workshop. A nice note, glad you came, here’s a link if you’d like to book. The families who were ready had already booked. The not-yet-ready ones got that one email, then nothing. And by spring, they’d drifted.
Firm B treated the follow-up like the real work, because for that group, it is.
The week after each event, every attendee got a short run of value. Not a pitch. One useful thing at a time, led with a story or a real-life situation they recognized. The daughter worried about her father got something on starting the long-term care conversation. The young couple got the documents every new family needs. Helpful, human, specific.
Then those attendees rolled into the monthly nurture. Every month, a piece of content worth opening, and right alongside it, an invitation to the next workshop. No pressure. Just a firm that kept showing up with something worth reading.
And then the part most firms skip entirely. A reactivation campaign built for one purpose: to reach the people who weren’t ready in December and help them take the next step now that they were. Again, led with value, stories, connection.
Here’s what that looked like in real numbers.
In the month of May, Firm B engaged fifteen clients from attendees who had come to those winter workshops, people who hadn’t booked on the day. Fifteen families who sat in a room late last year and earlier this year, weren’t ready then, and came back because the firm never stopped showing up.
That’s fifteen clients on top of everyone who booked at the events themselves (just in the month of May!).This system works month-after-month. The money to get the lead has been spent, what you do with it matters.
The workshop books the families who are ready. The follow-up books the ones who weren’t ready yet. Firm A got the first group and lost the second. Firm B got both.
Same room. Same information. Two very different springs.
Saving a seat for the not-yet-ready,
Laura Lee