A Follow-Up System for Coaches: How to Stop Losing Prospects Between Conversations

A follow-up system for coaches gives every prospect a clear next step. Each person you’re talking to sits in a stage of your sales process, such as getting to know them, inviting them to a call or sending a proposal, and each stage carries its own short list of what to do and when. Each morning starts with a short list of the people to contact that day and what each of them needs from you.

Sales that start in conversation (DMs, referrals, networking, discovery calls, proposals) depend on the next step happening on time, for every person, at the pace each one moves. Five prospects fit in your head. Twenty don’t, and a prospect who was a week away from yes goes cold because nobody reached out at the right time. Jump straight to the video for a three-stage follow-up system you can copy into your own business, with The Pipeline Framework, a complimentary planning guide, right beneath it.

The system in this post runs inside AttractWell, with your contacts, your to-do list for each of them, your booking calendar, your emails and your website in one account. Your first month is $1, and you can bring your own sales steps and questions to Office Hours, live every Thursday at 2pm ET.

Without a system, follow-up runs on memory. Who was I supposed to get back to? Whose DM is newest? Which email is sitting at the top of the inbox? Whoever surfaces first gets the reply, and everyone else waits until they surface too.

The trouble is that prospects don’t move together. One person you met last week needs a friendly check-in. Another had a great discovery call and is waiting on a proposal. A third said “not right now” two months ago and might be ready today. Holding each person’s place and next step in your head has a limit, and past that limit you become the bottleneck in your own sales process: the step that gets skipped is the one nobody remembered.

There’s a second cost. When follow-up lives in memory, nothing records where people stall. If prospects keep dropping off after you invite them to a call, there’s no record that shows the pattern, so there’s no way to fix the invitation. You can’t improve what you can’t measure, and a sales process run from memory leaves nothing to measure.

A follow-up system replaces memory with design. It starts with the steps you already take with a prospect, named as stages, and together those stages make up your sales pipeline. Every pipeline has an entry point (the moment someone becomes a lead), an exit point (they become a client, or they don’t), and a milestone goal at each stage that moves them to the next one.

Here’s an example sales process for a coach who meets prospects on social media:

Relationship Building: getting to know someone you met online, until there’s a reason to offer a conversation.

Consultative Shift: inviting them to book a discovery call, and following up on the invitation.

Active Offer: after the call, adding your notes, creating the proposal and sending it.

Proposal Sent: following up until they decide.

New Client: the agreement, the welcome and the first steps of onboarding. (The video below builds the first three of these five stages.)

Within a stage, you do the same things for everyone in it. Think of a pipeline as a to-do list that knows where each person is, broken into one smaller list per stage. A fast yes and a slow maybe each get the steps that fit where they are, and nobody has to rebuild a schedule by hand.

Your stages will carry different names and different steps. A network marketer’s might be Invited, Following Up and Enrolled. A consultant’s might run from Inquiry to Proposal to Signed. A practitioner who offers a complimentary first session might use Booked, Attended and Started. The structure holds for any business that sells through conversations, because every one of them has someone to get to know, an offer to make and a decision to wait on.

Each stage in AttractWell is built from the three parts in that heading plus one optional extra: a tag (the label), a Follow-Up Plan (the to-do list), an automation (the move forward) and, if they help, saved replies. Together they give every prospect who enters the stage the same label, the same reminders and the same way forward, without you setting anything up person by person.

A tag named for the stage. The tag marks where a contact is. Filter your contacts by it and you see everyone in Relationship Building, or everyone in Proposal Sent, in one list.

A Follow-Up Plan named for the stage. This is the stage’s to-do list: where a campaign is a series of emails AttractWell sends your contact on its own, a Follow-Up Plan reminds you what to do. Its timing counts from the day the plan is applied to a contact. In the Relationship Building example, Day 0 is “connect on LinkedIn” and “add notes from the first conversation,” Day 7 is “like or comment on one of their posts” and “pick up the conversation,” and you list the same two touches for Day 14, Day 21 and every week after, out to Day 90 in this example, so every person who enters the stage gets the whole run. Because the clock starts when a person enters the stage, someone who joined today and someone who joined a month ago each get the right reminder on the right day.

Saved replies (optional). If you send roughly the same email or text to everyone at a stage, save it as a reply named with the stage, such as “Consultative Shift: booking invite,” and name that reply in the stage’s to-do, so the reminder tells you which one to send. When it’s time, you pick it up instead of writing it from scratch, with your booking link already in it.

An automation named for the stage. This is the part that moves people. Run it on a contact and it adds this stage’s tag and Follow-Up Plan and removes the previous stage’s at the same time. The old reminders drop off, the new ones start counting, and each person’s list shows what’s next for the stage they’re in.

That last part is what keeps the system usable at twenty prospects or two hundred. Moving someone forward happens on their contact card, and their to-do list cleans itself up as they go.

Each stage has a goal, the action that moves someone to the next one. Where that goal happens decides how the next stage’s automation runs.

When it’s a judgment call, you run it. Some moves depend on the conversation, like a prospect naming a real problem they want help with. Open their contact card, run the next stage’s automation, and their new to-dos are waiting on your list.

When it’s a booked call, the booking runs it. If the goal of your Consultative Shift stage is a booked discovery call, attach the Active Offer automation to that call’s booking type, the bookable call your prospects pick a time for. When the prospect books, they move to Active Offer, and that stage’s to-dos for after the call (add your notes, create the proposal, send it) go on your list without you opening their record.

When it’s a form or a payment, the form or the sales page runs it. A lead form can start the first stage for every new lead who fills it out. A sales page can run your new-client automation at payment, clearing the prospect tags and plans and starting your onboarding to-dos.

People don’t always move forward, and the system doesn’t assume they will. If a prospect turns down an invitation but still feels like a good fit, run a move-back automation from their contact card that adds a stay-in-touch tag and plan (the weekly touches without the first-conversation steps) and removes the Consultative Shift ones. They’re back on a weekly rhythm with someone you already know.

Every morning, your dashboard lists the day’s to-dos beside your upcoming booked meetings. Check each one off as you finish it, add your notes to the contact as you go, and the list itself tells you who’s next.

The same four parts fit very different sales processes. Here are three, so you can see which one looks most like yours.

The coach who meets clients on social media. Relationship Building runs weekly touches (connect, comment, pick up the conversation) for up to 90 days. When a conversation turns to a real need, the coach moves that prospect to Consultative Shift from their contact card and sends a booking link. The booking moves them to Active Offer, with the call notes and the proposal on the list.

The network marketer who invites people to look at a product or an opportunity. After each invitation, the network marketer runs the Invited automation on that person, and the follow-up reminders for the invitation start. Anyone who says “not right now” gets moved to Following Up the same way, with longer stay-in-touch reminders, and anyone who says yes gets moved to Enrolled, where its welcome steps start.

The consultant or service provider who writes proposals. A lead form on the website starts Inquiry. A booked discovery call moves the prospect to Proposal, with reminders to add notes from the call, create the proposal, send it and follow up until they decide. When the client pays on your sales page or payment page, the automation there moves them to Signed, with onboarding to-dos, and the same automation can start a welcome campaign, a series of emails that sends on its own.

Whichever version you build, you can filter your contacts by stage and see who is sitting where. If people keep collecting in the stage where you invite them to book, and it isn’t just a busy week of new invitations, the invitation isn’t landing, so rewrite it or the saved reply that carries it. If people pile up after the proposal goes out, look at the proposal and the follow-up after it. The step that’s losing people shows up as the place they collect, and you can change that one step.

The usual alternative is a spreadsheet or a separate CRM such as HubSpot or Pipedrive, a booking tool such as Calendly, an email tool such as Mailchimp and a payment processor, each holding one piece of the same person. Moving a prospect forward means updating several places, and the reminder sits in one tool while that person’s emails, bookings and payments sit in others.

Open a prospect’s contact card in AttractWell and the stage tag, the to-do list and the history of emails sent and calls booked are side by side. The booking type that moves someone to Active Offer lives in the same account, and so does the sales page they pay on. When they pay, that page’s automation lands on the same contact card, so the client tag and the onboarding to-dos show up beside everything else. The follow-up and the record it’s about are on the same page.

Whatever platform you use or compare, check two things: that a prospect’s to-do list sits on the same record as their booked calls and emails, and that a booking, a form or a payment can move the prospect to their next stage without you. In AttractWell, the first is the contact card, and the second is the Run Automation setting on booking types, forms and sales pages.

Project Studio, the part of AttractWell that builds pages for you, can also build the pages that feed the system from a description you type, from the lead form page that starts the first stage to the sales page at the end of the pipeline. And when you get stuck, real people help you get it live: Office Hours every Thursday, plus small-group live help calls during the week.

To copy this into your own business, start with the video: Coach Ashley from the AttractWell team builds three stages (Relationship Building, Consultative Shift and Active Offer), each with its own Follow-Up Plan and automation. She moves a contact into Consultative Shift from the contact card, then books a call on that contact’s behalf, the way a prospect would, and the contact lands in Active Offer with a new to-do list: add notes from call, create proposal, send proposal.

The Pipeline Framework is the written companion to the video: three example pipelines laid out stage by stage, with the goal, the parts and what moves a prospect forward at each one.

Office Hours is a live group Q&A and hands-on help session every Thursday at 2pm ET. Bring your questions and whatever you’re working on, and join an upcoming session.

To see what AttractWell builds before anything else, the 5-minute Project Studio demo shows it in action, and what other coaches say shows what it’s like to use every day.

To talk to people first, join the free AttractWell Facebook group, or bring your sales steps to Office Hours, Thursdays at 2pm ET, and get live help with them.

For a guided look if you don’t use AttractWell yet, the live group demo walks you through it with a real person.

To start building, your first month is $1, and it comes with the 30-Day Launch Guarantee: “Use Project Studio, and if your website isn’t live within 30 days, we’ll build it for you and give you a free month.”

To hand the build to someone else, our Concierge team of experts sets up offers, funnels, homepages and pipelines like this one for you.

And to set up the discovery call that moves prospects forward, read Discovery Call Setup for Coaches, with three ways to set up its booking.

Part of our guide to how to get coaching clients.