The People Who Already Know You
Past clients, inquiries that went quiet, event attendees, people who read something and meant to reply. The conversations stopped because nothing was in place to continue them, not because the interest was not real.
Before anyone builds a new route to new people, there is a cheaper question worth asking. What happened to everyone who was already interested?
In every established practice I have looked at, the answer is the same. There is a substantial group of people who spoke to you once, worked with you once, attended something, replied to something, and then the thread ended. Not because they decided against you. Because nothing existed to continue it.
I call that the warm start, and it is almost always the first thing worth building, which is inconvenient for me commercially because it is also the smallest thing to build.
Silence is not a decision
The instinct is to read the silence as a no. It rarely is. A person who inquired in March and never came back was not conducting an evaluation of you that ended in rejection. They got busy. The thing they were dealing with became less urgent, or more urgent in a way that pushed everything else out. They meant to reply, and then replying became awkward because too much time had passed.
You know this is true because you have done it yourself, this year, to somebody whose work you respect.
There is a piece of evidence I like here, from an audit of how companies handle inbound interest. Researchers submitted test inquiries to 2,241 US companies and recorded what came back. 37% responded within an hour. 16% responded between one and 24 hours. 24% took more than a day. And 23% never responded at all.
Nearly a quarter of businesses receiving a direct expression of interest simply did not answer. Not because they had decided the person was not worth it, but because the answering was somebody's job and that somebody was doing something else.
That study is from 2011 and it covers sales organizations rather than practices, and one of its authors was running a company that sold lead-response software, which is a conflict worth naming out loud. But the shape of the finding matches what I see when I open the inbox of a busy practitioner, and it is worse there, not better, because there is no sales team at all.
Following up is not pestering
The other belief that keeps the warm start unopened is that reaching out again would be an imposition. This is the most decent-minded reason for leaving money on the table that I know of, and it is not supported by the evidence.
The cleanest study I have found on this is not about sales at all, which is why I trust it. Swedish researchers sent a health questionnaire to 3,876 employees and varied how many reminders they sent. Only 29% of the eventual respondents replied before receiving any reminder at all. 26% replied after one reminder. 45% replied only after two or more. Sending four to five reminders raised the total response rate by 15 percentage points over sending none. Eleven reminders raised it by 21 points.
Read the first figure again, because it is the important one. Seventy-one percent of the people who eventually engaged did not engage on the first ask. They were not annoyed by the reminder. The reminder is the reason they are in the data at all.
That research is about survey response, not client acquisition, and I am not going to pretend the transfer is exact. What it does establish is the underlying human fact: a single ask reaches a fraction of the people who are willing to respond, and the rest are lost to timing rather than to unwillingness.
What the warm start actually is
It is not a campaign and it does not involve a newsletter you have to write every week.
It is, concretely: a list of everyone who has ever raised a hand, in one place, with enough context attached to each name that a message to them can be specific. What they came for. What was discussed. What was happening in their life at the time. Whether anything was promised.
Then a way of reaching them again that does not depend on you having a free evening and a burst of resolve.
The context is the part that makes it work and the part most people skip. A message that says "checking in, hope you are well" is worse than silence, because it announces that you do not remember. A message that refers accurately to what the person was dealing with when you last spoke is a completely different object. It is not marketing. It is the thing a thoughtful person would send if they had perfect recall.
Most practitioners have that recall for their current clients and have lost it for everyone else. The information has not been destroyed. It is in old emails, old notes, a booking system, your head. It has just never been assembled in one place where it could be used.
Why this goes first
Three reasons, and the third is the honest one.
These people already understand what you do, so no explaining is required. They already trust you at least provisionally, which is the expensive part of any new relationship and it is already paid for. And it is the only growth move available that costs nothing per person and requires no new audience.
If a practice is going to make one structural change, this is the one with the best ratio of effort to result, and it is the one I would tell someone to do themselves if they never spoke to me again.
Sources: J. B. Oldroyd, K. McElheran and D. Elkington, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, Harvard Business Review, March 2011. Co-author Elkington was chairman and CEO of a lead-response software company, which HBR discloses. M. Svensson, T. Svensson, A. W. Hansen and Y. Trolle Lagerros, The effect of reminders in a web-based intervention study, European Journal of Epidemiology 27, 2012, 3,876 employees.