Do you provide high ticket offers? As a coach or consultant, you know that you need to get people on the phone (or a video call) in order to turn that lead into a sale.
Filling up your calendar with discovery calls can be the key to exploding your online business. It’s the best way to introduce someone to your business, build a relationship with your leads, and make sure you’re the right fit to help them.
And yet your calendar stays pretty empty.
How do you turn that around?
You can book more discovery sessions by implementing just one simple thing into your business.
In today's episode, we're going to learn how YOU can change one thing and get more discovery calls on your calendar.
Mentioned Resources:
5 Ways to Book More Discovery Calls
DM Me on Instagram
Do you provide high ticket offers? As a coach or consultant, you know that you need to get people on the phone (or a video call) in order to turn that lead into a sale.
Filling up your calendar with discovery calls can be the key to exploding your online business. It’s the best way to introduce someone to your business, build a relationship with your leads, and make sure you’re the right fit to help them.
And yet your calendar stays pretty empty.
How do you turn that around?
You can book more discovery sessions by implementing just one simple thing into your business.
In today's episode, we're going to learn how YOU can change one thing and get more discovery calls on your calendar.
Mentioned Resources:
5 Ways to Book More Discovery Calls
DM Me on Instagram
Do you provide high ticket offers now as a coach or a consultant, you know that you need to get people on the phone or at least a video call in order to turn that lead into a sale. Now filling up your calendar with discovery calls can your online consulting or coaching business. It is the best way to introduce someone to your business, build a relationship with your leads and make sure that you're the right fit to help them. And yet your calendar stays pretty empty. Now, how do you turn that around in today's episode? We're gonna talk about how you can book more discovery sessions by implementing just one simple thing into your business. Are you ready to dive in? You're listening to the captain coder podcast each week. I take you through actionable strategies that can help you grow your online business. I'm your host, Marisa VanSkiver, AKA captain coder. Okay, so I have bad news for you introverts. Let's just If your online service business runs on high ticket offers every once in a while, you have to get on the phone to sell. Now the best way to do this is with a laid back discovery call. Personally, I make all of my discovery calls be videos because it helps me to connect better with my customers. Now you can also run a discovery call through an actual phone call. Um, did you guys know, did you know that your iPhone also made calls too? It's mind blowing, right, but whatever way works best for you. The key here is to fill your calendar with discovery calls so that you can keep your sales pipeline flowing. It is the number one best way to get new leads into your business. And to turn those leads into sales. Now, before we dive into how you can do that and you know what you need to do to get more discovery calls, we wanna take a step back really quickly. You have to ask yourself how many of these discovery calls can I convert now? That's because we need to know the numbers here. At least have a goal and a guesstimate. If you've not started your business, or you're kind of trying to get your sales pipeline away from the referral only. And you're just new to this. It's totally okay. I want you to set, what's called a K P a key performance indicator. Basically. That's just a goal. You wanna have, you know, a set number of discovery calls on your calendar by say the end of quarter 3 20 22. So for instance, let's say that you know, that you need to bring in at least two high ticket clients a month into your business. Well, then you might wanna make sure or aim for. 10 Discovery calls in your business every month. Now, if you already know your conversion rates, if you know how many people that you convert, once you get them on the phone, then you can adjust this number. And if you wanna be able to get more than say two to three people, and you wanna be able to increase your capacity, that's up to you too, but you just have to know, okay, how many of these people do I realistically convert once they, once I get them on the phone with me and how many do I need to bring in every month to hit my sales goals? It sounds more complicated than it is, but all we're doing with this KPI is saying, okay, I know that I need to have three discovery calls a week. That's it. I just need to have three discovery calls a week, or I need to have 10 a month in order to hit my goal if I stay on track. So I want you to take a step back and figure out, or at least plan out what you think those numbers need to be. You have to know how many discovery calls you're aiming for here, because it just helps us to know if this strategy is working now, when it comes to booking more discovery calls, a lot of this is down to making it as simple and easy as possible for your clients. I know that sounds crazy, but what ends up happening a lot of times now, let's think about this scenario. So somebody's signed up for an offer or they've sent you an email. They fill out the contact form on your website. However, you get leads currently. And they, you know, that you need to get them on the phone. What ends up happening in a lot of our businesses, especially when we're, you know, either a solopreneur or we're doing most of the sales. And we're still working in our business quite a bit is we do what I call the calendar dance. So we sent a time, Hey, can you meet? You know, I'm in central standard time because you know, anybody could be anywhere in the world, potentially Australia, and you're in the states, whatever. So you send your time zone, Hey, I'm in CST.
Could you do 2:30 PM on Wednesday CST or 11:00 AM on Thursday CST. And then they answer back and they go, oh no, I can't make that work. What about these times? And you go back and forth and it's maddening and it can take multiple emails to find a time that works. So get rid of that all, all together and make this easier and put the control in your leads hands. So you can use very simple calendar scheduling apps. Now, personally, I just moved all of my scheduling into my CRM CRMs, like honey book, have this built in. And it's really nice because when somebody schedules with you, then you can put them into different automatic sequences and keep track of whether or not that lead turned into a sale into a project. But you can also use tools like Calendly or acuity. And I use just the Calendly free version for a very long time in my business. So you have the ability here to use free tools to make this really simple. Now, before you freak out, if you are at all a control freak about your time, like I am, and you don't like having things get scheduled, that you don't understand what's happening or where that came from and it throws off your whole mindset for the day. So before you freak out about that automatic scheduling thing, the great thing is, is all of these apps give you the ability to set your availability. So if you only wanna take calls on Wednesday afternoons you can set it up so that you only are available to book for discovery call at those times, if you only wanna take calls in the mornings, if you never wanna take a call on a Friday, all of those things can be set up, but here's the kicker and the big part for me, I don't like not having, you know, enough notice for when I'm going to have a call. I have to mentally prepare. I am an introvert. I don't love talking to people all day long every day. That's not my thing. So I have my system set up that you can't book a call with me unless it's at least 24 to 48 hours ahead. So you can't say for instance, get on my calendar Wednesday morning and book a call with me for Wednesday afternoon. That's never gonna happen. And, you know, especially when you already have other things planned out, even though everything sinks to my Google calendar. So it can't double book it. If I have something planned out in my head that I was gonna work on that afternoon, I don't have to worry about that so I can set it up and have it available so that either they can't schedule so far ahead either. So they can't schedule like, you know, two hours ahead of a time, but I also have it set up so that somebody has to book within the next 30 days. So they're not gonna be booking out six months in advance or whatever. You just have to take some time and adjust your calendar availability settings with any of these apps and make sure that it works for you. And here's the great thing. You can always tell someone, Hey, if you cannot find a time that works, say for instance, you're dealing with somebody in a time zone, so completely different to you that you might have to have a call with them at
5:00 PM in order to have it be at a reasonable hour for them, that's totally fine. Then you can give them a link and say, Hey, email me here. If you absolutely cannot find a time that works in your calendar and we will get it set up online, scheduling tools are so fantastic because it gives you the really quick ability to book more discovery calls and make it a hundred percent easier. Not only for you and it automates your systems, but it's easier for your client. And people are going to convert more when they can control the process. One of the core attendances of working with someone in an online business capacity is not making them think we're moving those barriers so that they don't have to worry about whether or not something is going to work. So if you are currently asking people to submit a contact form in order to get you on the phone, or, you know, a bunch of other different things, or even picking up the phone and calling you and hoping that you're available, which I never am. I only answer when my business line rings. I only am able to answer it about half the time, cause I don't have anybody else to answer it. It's just me. So when somebody picks up that phone or sends an email or, um, sends you a message on Facebook and they wanna talk right away, you're not going and doing the back and forth, you're making it super easy. You can just reply with your calendar link. Now, what do you do with this link? How do you actually get people to get to that page, fill out and book a call with you really? It's very simple. You add that link everywhere you can. You wanna add it to the footer of your website, potentially in your, in your menu at the bottom of the page, add it to your link in bio or social media links page and make it one of the top one or two things, depending on what your goal is. If you're really trying to get discovery calls and maybe get people to fill out a lead magnet, make your lead magnet, the first link and your discovery call the second link, cuz it gets people, the ability it gives.'em the ability to jump straight ahead to what they're looking for. If they're ready to just talk to you, you can add it at the end of a social media post as a CTA on LinkedIn on Facebook. Obviously you cannot add a link in a post on an Instagram post or in TikTok currently. So you wanna make sure that you're adding it where people can actually click and go immediately. But the cool thing is is you can add it to your Instagram stories and make that a link. Do a quick video, talking about why it's important to get on the phone with you, what problems you solve. And then add a link right there to book a discovery call with you. You wanna be able to add that link wherever somebody might discover you, add it in blog posts, add it in your podcast descriptions, um, add it in your LinkedIn profile, share it on Facebook, whatever you're doing to bring people into your orbit. You want to add your discovery call link in multiple places. So it's incredibly easy to find you and connect with you. One thing I would recommend once you get somebody booked onto that call to encourage show ups, you wanna make sure that you're sending a reminder email before the call and you're allowing them to reschedule the call on their own things happen. People have stuff come up and they can't necessarily jump on a call with you. So you wanna give them the ability to change that. And the email reminder that they get before the call Hey, if you need to reschedule this, just click this link, you're gonna improve your show up rate because then people can reschedule for a time. They can make it and they don't feel awkward having to email you and cancel. It also keeps all the automations flowing. You don't have to worry about things. You don't have to have somebody manually changing those things. And again, you are removing a barrier from your potential client and making it incredibly easy to work with you. And when you're making it easy to book something as simple as a discovery call, you're already building a rapport and trust with them. That's going to be easy to work with you moving forward. Now, when you wanna run a profitable discovery call, say for instance, you only need two or three high ticket offers a month. So you may only need seven to 10 discovery calls a month. If you're running discovery calls, you don't necessarily want to run as many as you could possibly run. So we wanna keep this profitable. Now, first things first, you wanna keep it short. My discovery calls are 20 minutes. 15 feels too short for some reason. 20 gives us enough time to get a little bit of light chit chat and banter out of the way, and then move in and dig into the call. And in this discovery call, you're not trying to sell anything necessarily. What you're really doing is focusing on whether or not you are the right fit to help them. You're also going to get a sense of whether or not you actually want to work with that person. We've all been there. We've all had clients who have come into our orbit sign contracts with them and they are the worst. Doing a short discovery call will help you weed out the people that you don't want to work with. And at the end of the call, you can easily say, you know, Hey, I don't think we're quite the right fit and either have some referrals for them so they can go find somebody else or just make it really simple. I don't do exactly what you're looking for, but let me know if you'd like me to check with some friends and see if they have any availability. It doesn't have to be personal and keeping it short. And to the point means you're not wasting time. Now, one thing that makes it really easy for me because I am an introvert and I get in my head, I have a framework for the call. Now my framework comes from my sales coach. So this kind of depends on what you are doing and what you are selling and whether or not you need, you know, something written out like with the exact questions that you need to ask, but just have some kind of framework. Don't go into this blind. Don't be me. Don't just wing it every single time. There's a reason. I now have a sales coach, cuz I know that winging it is not good. You know, you wanna have some kind of framework. It makes the call a lot easier. It makes the call run a lot more smoothly. And honestly it makes it a lot more uniform. So it becomes second nature. And it removes a lot of that anxiety about getting on the phone with someone and the key here too. When I have learned over the years, you don't wanna talk a lot on this call. You want your lead to do the talking, do a lot of active listening. Instead they want to maybe vent about their problems and they need to know that you might be the right person to help them more than that though. Active listening means that you're able to take notes. And it means that you're able to look for those pieces and those problems that you are able to solve and the pain points so that if you do get them back on a sales call, after the discovery call, you can basically repeat exactly what they said to you back to them and what you're going to fix. And it just makes them feel like they've actually been listened to when we are facing a problem. As a people, we get really frustrated that we don't, that nobody knows what we're going through, right? We especially as an entrepreneur, it is such an isolating feeling. And on top of things, if you're an online entrepreneur and you're dealing with things, you know, with clients virtually it can, your clients can feel incredibly isolated because they're working from home or they're working from a co-working space or a coffee shop. They're not in a traditional sense. And they maybe don't have a lot of friends who are also entrepreneurs who understand what they're dealing with, no matter what kind of coach or consultant you are. It's very likely that you're your ideal customer is coming to you because they feel isolated because they have a problem because they have a pain point. They wanna resolve. That's the only reason people buy stuff. They're trying to solve a problem of some kind. So when you listen, when you actually listen to them, talk, it is amazing. And how much that can do to build up not only the trust, but a personal relationship with your lead so that they're sold before they even get on that next sales call. Now having a booking calendar and having an automated tool like this will do a lot to increase your leads. And your discovery called bookings. But there's more that we need to do to get people into our sphere and to connect with us and get on those calls. So what can you do now? You're in luck. I have created a free video walkthrough guide and downloadable PDF that you can go and grab. That teaches you five ways to book more discovery calls, five ways to get people into your orbit and five ways to drive them, to actually book a call with you. Now, if you wanna grab this, it is linked in today's show notes, or you can go to cap coder.com/zero four. And there is a form at the bottom of the blog post for today's podcast episode, where you can grab your free copy. Now this is 100% free. It's an easy 20 minute video or less. That'll walk you through multiple ways that you can change up your marketing to get more people in your sales funnel and on discovery calls. Or you can jump over to Instagram. Send me a message at captain coder and just send the words, discovery call. I'll send you the link immediately to grab the free video and resource. I cannot wait to hear from you guys SIM you DM. Tell me how these strategies work for me. Tell me how many more discovery calls you're getting booked and especially if how much easier it is to book calls. Once you've gone through this training, thank you all for tuning in to our show this week to catch more captain coder, you can subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now, if you have any questions or you wanna learn more about digital marketing and how it can help grow your online business, follow us on instagram@captaincoderorvisitusonlineatcapcoder.com. Can't wait to talk to you all again next week.