3 Costly Mistakes Coaches Make in Sales Call that Turn Clients Away

Sales call is where many coaches feel stuck with in the conversion process to turn their audience into paying clients.

Throughout my 7 years of online business experience and sales experience that I acquired through talking to more than 100 people, I would like to share 3 costly mistakes that I see many coaches and my clients make in conducting sales call that turn client away.

1. Not taking the lead and giving information

At the beginning of the sales call, your client would be like a person walking into a conference room meeting a lawyer or a doctor and don’t know what to expect.

He or she would be looking for you to take the lead.

And that is good because you can position yourself as the expert and specialist by doing this as well.

If you already have a replicable sales process laid out, you would know exactly what you need to do at this stage of conversion. The purpose of a sales call would be to know your potential clients better so that you can decide whether what you are offering can benefit them.

It is no difference than those introductory meetings there legal professions meet with their potential clients to hear out their case before deciding whether this is in the area of practice that they can help with and whether they have the time, space and energy to take on this client. I use this example because I am from the legal industry, but I am sure there are many other high-end service-based business — be it brick-and-mortar or online — would have similar process before taking on clients.

So sales call should not be seen as a way to scam, trick or manipulate people into your offer. Rather, it is something that traditional business has been doing for centuries before signing up clients. We are simply doing it in the format of an online conference call.

There are some coaches who like to call it discovery call, consultation call, or sales call, it is the same thing i.e. the pre-signing up meeting with client to see if the clients are a fit to our offer and whether we can help them to solve their problem or achieve a specific goal.

Against this context, your potential clients would be looking for you to lead them through the meeting and ask the questions that you think would help you to access whether they are the right fit for what you have to offer.

Assuming that there are multiple touchpoints prior to this call, your potential clients should already know a little about you and your offer and they are interested to know more, specifically, they are interested to know how this offer may help them to solve their problem or achieve their goals.

Being a coach or consultant who knows what he or she is doing, you would establish authority when you have a process of how the call should go and what it should look like so that your potential clients feel safe investing time in this call.

The worst thing that could happen is that you give up the driver seat and simply open the room for your potential clients to speak about whatever they are stuck with and you are providing solutions in the call that made them feel like they can simply take the information and implement on their own because the information is cheap.

Your potential clients can google more information than you could ever possibly give in the call in much less time. Yet, if that is the solution to their problem, they would not take the trouble to schedule a call with you.

So clearly what they are looking for is more than information. By simply disposing information at this stage in the sales call is only going to cause false hope, disappointment and distrust eventually when your potential clients get off the call and do it themselves without getting real results because what they need help with is support in the execution.

This is a big no-no and one of the mistakes that I have learnt the hard way when I first get into the business.

2. Not vetting

The second Costly Mistakes Coaches Make in Sales Call that Turn Clients Away is not vetting.

What I mean by that is that the sales call would probably be the last door that the potential client has to open to get to your offer. Hence, it is of vital importance that it serves the purpose of final vetting of those who want to get through.

The consequences of letting in everyone while not everyone is a fit would be detrimental to your brand.

A business brand is how people think and talk about your business.

If you are not doing the vetting in the sales call, sooner or later the potential clients would find a discrepancy between what they really want and what you offer.

Your offer could be excellent and the best in the world, but if this is not the very thing that the clients want, it is not worth a penny to them and they would feel like the investment is wasted and get angry, frustrated, and unhappy about this purchase.

Yes, perhaps you could make some short term quick profit this way, but over the long haul, your business will suffer if you repeatedly take money from everyone who you know would not be a good fit for your offer and you are not helping them to make a decision in their highest interest.

3. Desperate to get clients

Wow, this is huge.

When it comes to sales, your potential clients can smell blood miles away.

If they smell that you are desperate, it turns them away even if they are a fit to your offer and your offer can solve their problem. The reason is that we human has a natural dislike to be sold to, to be cornered and forced to do something.

We have a psychologically rebellious mindset that we want to resist when we are pushed.

So when you are desperate, you are under financial pressure to get clients, somehow it changes the way and the tone that you speak and it makes signing up clients harder.

This is why in all pre-call sessions, I never look at how many more clients I need to sign to reach my income goal this month. It does not help the call at all and it puts me in a desperate mental state to try to sign the next person who I talk to on the phone — this is no good.

On the contrary, when you detach yourself from your income goal and focus on the process, things suddenly become easy and clients want you.

This may sound counter-intuitive but this is true — I have tested it myself and teach it to all my clients and this one ‘trick’ alone increases conversion rate by 15%!

Don’t take my word for it, try it and let me know how it goes~

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If you need support in increasing your conversion rate in sales call in your coaching business, dm me “Chat” on IG @simplifiedbusinesscoach

so that we can talk about where you are now and where do you want to be in 90 days (and how you can get there).