“I don’t think you have a messaging problem at all. I think you have a follow-up problem.”
I said that to a client a few weeks after she started reaching out to new people on LinkedIn. She came to our call ready to rewrite her introduction message. She was sure that was the issue.
Here’s what her numbers actually said. Most of the people she reached out to said yes to connecting. That’s better than I usually see. But after that first yes, about half never said another word. Another big group sent a polite “thanks for connecting.” Only a small handful turned into a real conversation.
She read that as: my message must not be landing.
I read it differently. Her message was the one part of this that was clearly working. People were saying yes to it. What she didn’t have was a second message. Nobody who went quiet had ever heard from her again. Not once. She had never written a follow-up, because nobody had told her that most people don’t respond the first time, and that this is completely normal.
If she hadn’t learned that, here’s what would have happened. She would have rewritten her message, and nothing would have changed. So she’d have rewritten it again. And after a few rounds of that she would have decided LinkedIn doesn’t work for her.
Wrong conclusion. Right effort, wrong spot.
Why so many good service providers stay stuck
If you’re great at what you do and still not getting clients consistently, you’ve probably heard a lot of advice. Post more. Rebrand. Redo the website. Get another certification. Work on your mindset. Fix your messaging.
Notice what all of that advice has in common. It tells you what to do without ever telling you what’s actually wrong.
So you do what any capable person does. You try to fix everything at once. And because you’re fixing six things when only one is broken, nothing seems to move, and you start to wonder whether the problem is you.
It isn’t. Getting clients is a series of small steps, and each step can break on its own. When you don’t know which step is broken, you end up rewriting the part that was already working. That’s exactly what my client almost did.
So the first job is never “fix the messaging.” The first job is to find out where the breakdown actually is.
The four places it can break
Every new client, no matter how you find them, goes through the same four steps. Someone hears from you. They respond. You have a real conversation. They say yes. That’s true whether you’re reaching out on LinkedIn, asking for referrals, emailing past contacts, or replying to people who comment on your posts.
The question I want you to ask is not “when am I going to get a client?” It’s “which of these four steps is breaking first?”
Step 1: nobody responds at all. The people you’re reaching aren’t the right people, or what you’re leading with doesn’t matter to them. This is the only one of the four that a better message can fix.
Step 2: they respond, but it never becomes a real conversation. This is where at least half of the women I work with get stuck. Turning a friendly reply into “want to grab twenty minutes?” is a skill, and almost nobody has it on day one.
Step 3: you have the conversation and hear “sounds good, maybe later.” That’s a problem with how the conversation itself goes. No amount of rewriting your introduction will touch it.
Step 4: they say yes. This is where you want all the effort to end up.
Each broken step has its own fix. You cannot solve step 3 with a step 1 tool. Most people try anyway, because the message is the part they wrote and the part they can see.
Three ways smart women fix the wrong thing
I saw all three of these in a single week of coaching calls.
The worry that doesn’t match the numbers. A women’s health coach told me two things in the same breath. First, that fewer than one in ten people were saying yes to her connection requests. Second, that she worried she came across like she was interrogating people once they did.
Those are two different problems, and only one of them is real right now. “Interrogating” is a step 3 worry. It only exists once someone has said yes and is talking to you. She was stuck at step 1. So I said what I always say in that spot: let’s solve them in order. I’d like more people for you to interrogate before we worry about whether you’re actually interrogating.
She needed roughly three times as many people saying yes. That’s a question of who she’s reaching and what she leads with. We left her tone alone.
The label that isn’t the problem. A fractional operations consultant told me she was “stuck on who her ideal client is” and needed to rework her emails. But she was already asking for referrals. She was already emailing a specific list. You can’t do either of those without knowing who you’re talking to.
She knew exactly who she served. The emails were the problem. The draft she’d been working from kept leading with a service her real targets don’t buy. That’s a wording fix, not an identity crisis.
The decision made on zero business days. A corporate wellness consultant sent a small batch of messages on a Wednesday and Thursday, saw almost no replies, and by the following Tuesday had picked a whole new audience to switch to.
I wouldn’t touch anything yet. It was a long weekend. If you sent it Thursday, they were off Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. On Tuesday morning they may have had zero business days to even see it.
A tiny batch plus a holiday is not information. Keep the audience, send more, and look again next week.
What to do instead
The discipline is simple enough to write on a sticky note.
Count four things each week: how many people you reached out to, how many responded, how many real conversations you had, and how many said yes. Then look at those four numbers in order and find the first place the number falls off a cliff. That’s your one problem. Fix only that. Then look again next week.
If hardly anyone responds, work on who you’re reaching and what your first message leads with.
If people respond but it goes quiet, write a follow-up. Most people don’t answer the first time, and that’s not rejection, it’s life. Send a first message when they say yes. A second two or three days later. A third three to five days after that. Three messages is the starting point. Mine runs longer.
If you’re having friendly exchanges but never getting to a real conversation, work on the ask. There’s a natural moment, two or three replies in, where “want to grab twenty minutes?” fits. Learn to take it.
If you’re having the conversations and nobody says yes, that’s the conversation itself to fix, and nothing earlier in the process will fix it for you.
And in every case: don’t change anything based on a small sample. A couple of weeks isn’t enough to panic over. The real pattern usually shows itself around week four to six.
Why I trust this
My team has been reaching out to 200 new people a week on LinkedIn for a year and a half. At the very beginning I felt exactly how most of my clients feel. Awkward. Unsure. Pretty certain I was bothering people. That lasted maybe two months. By the time I’d signed two clients that way, I thought, oh, this works.
Confidence is not a requirement, and it isn’t something you get ahead of time. It shows up after you do the thing and clients start saying yes. What gets you there isn’t a better introduction message. It’s knowing which step is broken and fixing that one, every week, without touching the parts that are already doing their job.
Which one is yours?
If getting clients feels like it “isn’t working,” resist the urge to open your message template or your website. Count the four numbers instead. Reached, responded, talked, said yes. Where does the first number drop?
If you’re not sure how to read them, we take a look at where things are actually breaking down, in our 6 Reason webinar. Teach you the six reasons you’re not getting clients and help you figure out which one to fix first.
