How to Book Your First 3 Clients Without Social Media
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Dietitian Boss podcast. I'm Libby Rothchild, helping you grow your business with confidence. Today's topic includes how to book your first three clients without social media. So not everyone wants to show up on Instagram every day, and you don't have to if you don't want to. If you're not ready yet, you can still get clients without using this tool.
You might change your mind and use it down the road, but you don't have to use social media to get clients right now. So if the idea of posting dancing or even direct messages gives you anxiety, this episode is created just for you and highly requested by a lot of members in our community. A lot of people come to us because they wanna use social media, but then they realize that they're not quite ready to be consistent yet, and that's okay. I'm here to validate that the way you feel and your concerns are normal and there are other ways, other routes to success that don't include social media [00:01:00] right now. So I'm gonna show you three proven strategies that Dietitians can use to book your first clients without social media, so you can stay offline and still get paid and create that impact that you desire, all while feeling more confident delivering your service.
So let's go ahead and dive in. What are those strategies? So the first thing is to focus on outreach through your existing network. this is not cold outreach. This is not you calling random. People and strangers. This is tapping into your existing network. So for example, one of our clients, she didn't have a business Instagram yet, but she made a simple list of 15 people, coworkers, old classmates, and even her OB office,
And then she emailed those people and she said Hi. And just opened a virtual practice supporting women through pregnancy, right? If you know somebody who needs help with meal planning or energy levels, I'd love to help. Here's my link. She gave them a link to her EMR. She happened to use practice better.
She was able to book three clients in two [00:02:00] weeks. So that could be you, and that doesn't involve any Instagram in that outreach, she reached out to people she already knew and what I just shared with you, that simple email copy, meaning the words, just one, two sentences that she wrote. Of course you can modify that if you don't know yet who you wanna serve, like you're not sure if you wanna help people in, let's say, who have diabetes or kidney disease.
You can just say, I have a virtual private practice helping people with nutrition. Just the point is just make that list of people and start sending those emails. So use our referral message template from the Dietitian boss library, and you can send that up to 10 people.
Now I actually have a free guide where I have the script written out for you, and you can grab that starter kit on our [email protected], so you can immediately get access to what you say in that email and just modify it slightly to best fit your personality. the second strategy includes leveraging provider referrals.
So that means doctors, therapists, chiropractors, [00:03:00] and gyms, right? And all of these locations, these people, these other business owners, they need trusted Dietitians to refer to. So one of our clients who specializes in heart health used our one sheet referral form template and actually faxed. That sheet to 10 local cardiologists and he followed up with one phone call per office the next week,
So he reached out to 10 and then followed up the next week. He only got one call back, but that call got him one new client and that's all you need to get started, right? So inside the library we do include templates for you, referral forms, also cover letters, Fax cover letters and emails, templates that you can use for local offices.
And so you might be wondering, is that for insurance only? And it's not. You can definitely reach out to local gyms and also there are other cash pay practices that don't accept insurance or that do insurance and cash pay. So the point is to leverage provider referrals and some of them might not be a good fit, but at least start reaching out to [00:04:00] your community.
And that's a really good place. To build relationships. And you might find that people ask you to do talks and they might ask you to be involved in a challenge or have a booth or something like that. And it all starts from building that relationship, right? think about who you could contact and leverage in terms of providers. You can go online and look for them. You might already know someone in your town. So start with a list. The third strategy includes offering a low commitment package. So if no one knows you yet, make it easy for people to say yes.
So what that package could include, and maybe the best word would be just one consult and then one follow up, which is technically a bundle. So you might wanna offer like two sessions, right? Or even just one session. It's ideal if you can sell a bundle, but if you're lacking confidence, the easiest thing to do would just be to sell one session.
Think about a price that feels good to you. You can always start with what [00:05:00] Medicare rates offer, and you can look up online in your state what those general rate. They're public rates. So you can look up the rates for Medicare, and then you can price above or below 20% of what that rate is for an initial consult session in your state.
So that's a good starting point. So if you wanna focus on an initial session. For 55 minutes or an hour and price that at what seems fair go 10% below what Medicare charges. That would be a good way to do it, and you can promote that. Through, let's say asking somebody if you can promote your services through a newsletter, or maybe that's an alumni newsletter for where you went to school, or maybe it's through your church or some community organization or maybe your child's daycare,
So find where you might be able to ask if you can be included in a promotion for an existing business. You don't need social media for this. You can just ask a college listserv or you can ask someone in your community.
Think of an entry level offer, like an initial session. A bundle of a couple sessions or a package would [00:06:00] technically be a time-based offer. So that means you'd be selling something for let's say, three to six months. I don't recommend you start with something that has a longer commitment. Start with something easier to sell.
It would be like an initial and a follow up or an initial and two follow ups, right? Or if you're lacking confidence, it would just be one session, but still try to get them to follow up with you on that session. All right, when you are making this offer, you will need to have some intake forms, right?
So you're gonna need to send them policy and procedure form. You're gonna need to send them a simple intake form, like with our. health history. Again, it can be brief, and then you might wanna also send them a feedback form or a testimonial form after the session. And all of those forms I've created for you and you get access to them when you join the library,
Dozens more. I also have a lead tracker template that's available for free. You can get, an idea of what that looks like when you grab our starter And that would be the secret to staying consistent without social media. And that's the follow up. So a lead tracker could be [00:07:00] a Google sheet or an Excel sheet, or even you could do pen and paper,
People's organization's name, the date you reached out, the date you followed up, and the contact person that you heard from or spoke to. And that's gonna help you keep track of how often are you doing outreach and how many times do you need to do outreach before you hear a yes. And we're not gonna judge based on what that number is, but we wanna get a sense of what that looks like, so you know how much you should be doing outreach in the future.
And this does work. It just might mean that you need to be doing more outreach than you had thought initially. So the lead tracker should include. Who you've contacted. a note of when to follow up or any other notes that would be pertinent, and then of course, stay organized and confident by having things in, consistent rows and columns inside of your tracker.
So offline marketing is still marketing, right? The key is to follow through. Of course, I love online marketing, which can include social media, email marketing, even [00:08:00] using your website as a tool, but thinking about ways to go offline is not dead. So you can absolutely find opportunities in your local community and through sending an email right through your personal email and just reaching out to friends and family and people that you already know.
If you want referral scripts, templates for how to structure your offer and official lead trackers to start getting clients without social media, I do invite you to check out our free toolkit [email protected]. And if you wanna go deeper, of course, I would love to see you of our monthly membership called the Dietitian Boss Library where we give you access to outreach scripts, referral Packaging for your offer and guidance and tools to help you with your first client. We certify you, in clinical scenarios as we give you different case studies for diabetes, general wellness, eating disorder, disordered eating, sports, nutrition. We offer you sales scenarios that you can practice and get certified with, as well as how to position your [00:09:00] offer and how to create content effectively when you're ready to do that.
Our membership is progressive. It helps you at the beginning, all the way through your advanced stages of business. Head over to Dietitian boss.com and become a member today.
