Your Free Strategy Call Feels Like a Sales Trap

Book a strategy call. Book a discovery call. Book a super cool, awesome game plan session where I'm going to do all this free work for you in the next 45 minutes. Your prospects and my prospects, they just translate that into one thing. Cool. Another sales call, call to action. So, even though you can provide a tremendous amount of value on these discovery sales game plan calls, whatever you want to call it, chances are you're leaving a lot of potential business on the table by asking for this too early. And you might actually be wasting a lot of your time with calls you never would have had to take if you just push this back in your sales process. So, hey, I'm Jason, faith-based entrepreneur. Timestamps and resources below, including a link to today's sponsor, Go High Level, the best all-in-one marketing platform that can help you automate your sales process, including your bookings and scheduling. But more on that later. First, I want to

talk about why with my marketing agency, we wound up removing all of our calls to action for book a free game plan, strategy, discovery call. Those were the three different iterations we went with because we kept trying to change what it was called so that it didn't sound like a sales call. But I think we pretty much exhausted all of the different words we could use. And so, there are three reasons that we found to move this back in the sales process to stop pushing trying to get prospects on the phone. so early and then I'll show you what we did that actually wound up working a lot better. Reducing the number of calls we had per day or week and then actually increasing our close rates. So, the number one problem with this is you just wind up talking to way too many people who aren't ready to do business with you. And this actually ties into number two because number two, it actually repels your best future customers because people who actually value their time are not just going to willy-nilly sign up for a 45minute game plan session after reading a really cool Facebook post or watching a 10-minute YouTube video. They need a lot more interaction and time with you and your business and your brand before they're willing to invest their time with the call. And I think that's one of the biggest shifts we need to look at here is instead of looking at it as us offering our time because we're so altruistic, it's we're asking people to invest their time with us so we can show them how to be helpful. So when you flip that, all of a sudden you realize, yeah, offering free strategy, you know, discovery call across your social media channels or in your ads is just actually asking for something. You're not actually offering something. And then number three, most importantly, the problem with having discovery and strategy calls upfront in your sales process is it puts a lot of pressure on the call itself. Because now on the call, you have to build rapport. trust. You probably have to handle a bunch of objections. And of course, even with these roadblocks, having it so far upfront in your sales process, I'm not saying you don't have to do sales calls all together. I have seen those Facebook ads that say, "Hey, book your, you know, six figure clients and never get on the phone. " I just have not seen that work practically. But I will say every once in a while we get a client out of the blue. He emails us says, "I have cart launch budget. I really want to work with you. " But here's a strategy you can use for the other 364 days of the year when that doesn't happen. First, a quick word from today's sponsor, Gohigh Lee. Gohigh Level is the all-in-one marketing platform I use to streamline my entire business with automation and AI builtin. With a massive template library, clean drag and drop editor, and new website builder, you can create unlimited websites, build sales funnels, and launch e-commerce storefronts. Then host your courses, run private communities, and even live stream all from your own branded membership site and custom mobile app experience. Stay top of mind with AI powered email and social DM automations that consistently drive people to your offers, bookings, or sales messages. And with built-in AI agents, handling the customer questions, lead follow-up, and even content delivery, your business can respond and keep selling even when you're offline. On top of that, it replaces a ton of other tools most entrepreneurs end up paying for, giving you one place to build, run, and automate your business with AI. Check out the link below to learn more and grab a 30-day free trial with our exclusive bonuses. And so what

we did in our agency is instead of offering a strategy call upfront, we switched to just offering a lead magnet. And the power of this is there is very little commitment on the side of your future customers and prospects. All they need to do is enter their name and email and they get this valuable piece of whatever [snorts] it is that you offer. I'll leave a link in the description to a full-blown guide on different types of lead magnets. But for consulting, I really like audits. And so we would offer a Google Ads playbook or a tracking audit. So someone could go through their accounts, see the things that they might be doing wrong, and that sets up the value of our discovery call later on in the process. And this also gives us an opportunity to collect a lot of email addresses from the 90% of people or I should say 99% of people who see your content, engage with your ads who do not want to jump on the phone with you. In fact, I've had people on my list for years before they finally hopped on for a discovery call and it took that long for them to finally be ready to hop on the phone with us. Or you could criticize me in the comments for having really bad calls to action and I should have been able to get them on the phone in three months of them joining our email list. But that's beside the point because once you have

someone's email, you relieve the pressure of trying to get them on the phone now and you have a vehicle and avenue in the form of email marketing to slowly build rapport, build trust, build goodwill, and actually handle some of their objections before they finally get on the phone with you. And one of the

final things that we did in tweaking our own process is we created a short sales presentation that we would show a couple of days after someone joined our email list. So we give them the free thing. We tell them how to use the free thing, the audit or the Google Ads playbook, so that they can see that we can be genuinely helpful and valuable. That's important. If you just use AI to make all this stuff, people are going to see that and they're not going to get on the phone with you, right? So it does need to genuinely be helpful. this lead magnet that you create. And then we show them a sales presentation and it kind of pre-qualifies them for the sales call. Now, it's up to you if you want to put pricing in here. I only put pricing in our sales videos or before they hop on the call if we have a huge volume of people and we're just like, we need to filter out more. But for the most part, you can still keep that uh awkward this is how much it actually costs for the sales call. After all, that's kind of the point of the call. you can handle the objections in real time and actually close people. And then after the sales video, we show them the

booking page. And so people don't actually see the booking page anywhere from 5 to 7 days after they've joined our email list. So even if this initial sequence doesn't work, spoiler alert, 90 to 95% of people are not going to book a call with you. That's just the way it goes, right? It's a numbers game with marketing. Those 5% of people you get on the phone with, you have a person who's much more qualified. They've already gone through some of your information and there's a lot less pressure to prove yourself and your value. It's a lot easier to focus on them and their struggles and their roadblocks and addressing their objections to actually close them. And so that's a very simple way you can reduce the amount of time you're spending on the phone with unqualified prospects. And if you really want to get fancy, you can do like a pre-all survey if you want. I'll leave a link in the description to a video that goes through how to actually set all of this up because this process is really designed for those 5% of people, 3 to 5% of people who are really actually genuinely interested in doing business with you, your services or your consulting. And then all those other leads that you collected, you can still send emails to them and you can offer them other products and services that aren't whatever it is that you offer. And so this way you're growing an audience, you're growing an email list, and you're protecting your time because you're recognizing that when you offer a sales discovery, game plan, session, call, whatever you want to call it, you're actually asking for a commitment on the part of your prospect, you're not necessarily making a free offer. And so that's why we need to build a lot more goodwill and rapport before we ask for

that. Does that mean you need to take your calls to action off all of your social media and all of your websites? Of course not. You can have it there for people who for those small percentage of people who do want to hop on the phone with you immediately. But when it comes to your content and your ads, let's switch it so your primary call to action is some sort of lead magnet in order to collect that email, take the sales pressure off, and give yourself time to build up that goodwill and rapport before the sales call. So hopefully this was helpful. Let me know in the comment section your specific type of consulting business and if you're struggling to come up with a lead magnet idea. Again, link in the description to the resource to create one. Along with a link at the top of the description to today's sponsor, Go High Level. When you sign up via our link, you'll get our best performing funnel templates to help you automate this entire process. We went through a community to ask me questions live via calls as well as a growing library of templates, tools, and automations to help you scale your business. So, thank you so much for watching and until the next, keep building the business you love.