Let’s discuss the discovery call and how to set it up. 

I once had a business coach who came and said to me, ‘I want to sell a $10,000 coaching program and I don’t want to talk to anybody, I just want to do some stuff and I want them to pay me $10,000 for my coaching program’. I looked at it and thought, well, you’re not Tony Robbins, and Tony Robbins asks for between $2500 and $5,000 for one of his programs, and he still has a sales team who picks up the phone and phones you to ask you questions, see what you want and then facilitate your process to pay.

When we want people to engage our services, if it is a coaching service and you’re going to be spending your time coaching someone, no one is going to just give you the money.

Hello, tell me about you?

Don’t you wish you could have a discovery call with your GP’s and get to know them better before committing? Because how frickin hard is it finding a decent GP? Seriously, I’m lucky enough to finally have found another one by accident. But it’s really hard to find a GP and I think that anybody who’s working one on one with somebody wants to have that conversation, you want to get to know them better.

That’s the whole purpose of your Facebook profile. Similar to what we’re doing in our 14 day Facebook content challenge at the moment, it’s the same thing. We want to develop that relationship with people so that they trust that they know, like, and trust us, but what that means is that they are prepared to hand over money. They need to know, like, and trust us enough to want to do business with us and to happily hand over money.

The discovery call is a way for people to do that.

A webinar that is also a way for people to get to know you.

When people do a webinar, that is a way for people to know, like and trust you and have this experience with you so that at the end, when you ask them for money, you’ve kind of forged that gap so that they’re more likely to hand over the money. And, for the last webinar I did, there were five people who still booked a call with me afterwards before they handed over the money. And in fact, one I had two calls with before they handed over the money. So just to show you that when people are working with you, they’re not just going to hand over money, you need to build that relationship first.

Don’t forget the buffer!

Discovery calls can be as long or as short as you like. When you set it up on your booking calendar you should also set up what’s called a buffer. A buffer is a setting in the calendar that you using and takes away space before and after that nobody can book.

For example, I allow certain hours to take my inquiry calls, I do them between 9h30 and 10h30 in the morning and 15h00 and 16h00 in the afternoon. That means I can do 4 discovery each day.  I then book for one-hour or two-hour coaching sessions in the middle of the day. I used to take the discovery calls in the middle of the day as well. But unfortunately it was disruptive and it was stopping people from being able to book in one-hour and two-hour sessions.

The reason you put a buffer in a booking calendar is that you’re going to have to do follow up. So if you do a discovery call, you’re going to have to write notes on what that discovery call was, what were they interested in? If they asked you to send you more information, do you have to email them? When do you have to follow up with them? Therefore you have to allow for that buffer on either side.

The booking system I use is Calendly

When you set up your calendar booking system you can set up all of those options. You decide when you’re going to allow your discovery calls to happen and when you’re going to allow your coaching appointment to happen. That is why I’ve chosen Calendly. It has a separate URL for each of those individual appointments.  If you have a Zoom account you can put your meeting ID into Calendly. Then when somebody books they automatically get a Zoom link, and it automatically creates a Zoom appointment. So when you go into Zoom, those appointments are already sitting there – that whole process is automated, which is amazing.

Don’t forget to get their email address….

Make sure that you get your potential clients email address to add to your database. When somebody books a call with me, I automatically get the email address, that email address gets Zapped into my database which is super cool, because now when you send out your newsletters they are automatically included. Remember the whole purpose is to build a database, to build your list of people who are interested in your services.

The reason we do this is that even when you have that discovery call you might only get 20% or 30% who agree on the phone call to say, Yep, I’m signing up with you now. The other 70% I’m going to say, oh, not right now. They may not be quite there yet.

Now that they’re on your database you can include them when you send out your emails and you are going to constantly be the forefront of the mind. They are not going to forget about you because you’re going to be sending out your Podcasts, sending out your newsletter and offers. You’re going to continue to build a relationship with them through the emails. Perhaps when you run a webinar they will join you and maybe back into another sales call, or they might not even need a second sales call.

Booking link

Most importantly you need to have a booking link and it needs to be clear and easy to find. You can put the booking link either in your services or in your about section – you can also have a call to action button. So for example, I don’t want people just calling me throughout the day because I am coaching and I’ve got events on and different things. So instead what I want is I want them to book a call.

I also ask them qualification questions, now you may not necessarily need to have qualification questions – for me, it is necessary as a lot of people just want free advise and that is a waste of my time. Asking qualifying questions is going to stop the tire kickers from phoning and asking for free advice.

Once the booking has been made they will automatically get email reminders which will include a link that they can add to their calendar.  Should they need to reschedule their appointment, the information is also in the email confirmation.

The easier you make it for people to book the better, for the client and for you.