023: Close More Clients with Smart Sales Call Prep

Catis, I still can't remember. The best way for me to bring this to life for you though is to tell you a story. And for this story I'm gonna tell you about a client. We're gonna call her Diane. So she is an amazing life coach. She specifically works with women who are empty nesters. The kids are grown.

Sometimes they have, you know, these women have been divorced or maybe they've been widowed. And these women that she specifically works with feel completely alone. Diane had gone through this exact season of life when her youngest graduated from high school and moved across the country to go to her.

She loved the home because when she looked out the back. Garden, she would immediately be brought back to the lovely memories of them sipping coffee. Or she would look at the driveway and remember him teaching their middle daughter how to score a goal. And their middle daughter is currently a, a junior in university on a full ride soccer scholarship.

She wanted it to be taken seriously and be able to get the type of transformation for her clients that she had experienced. So this certification program said they were going to teach her how to sell her services. She did exactly as she was taught. She was offering these one hour or more calls. These were free calls, and they were draining her.

Boom, the whole game changed. She was finally getting yeses and feeling great about it, and that's why I really encourage you to think about this because so much of the success of a sales call or any type of sale, whether it's a call or whether it's a demonstration or any kind of conversation where you're going to make a proposal, it happens before you ever say hello.

Big programs that teach you a skill, but selling is not one of them. And unfortunately, there's a lot of really good people who have really good transformation opportunities for people out there. They could have clients, but they just fumble the ball here. And it's super sad. So Diane met me because she came to one of my webinars as many people do, and she came into my program and it was incredible how things changed for her.

So. Here's your action step today. The next time you have a call booked on your calendar, and I mean any kind of call, a lot of you might be having coffee chats, or you might be doing peer discovery calls or some other version of that. Any time you have a call booked on your calendar, your action step is to start a recon sheet.

I love Google folders. You put them in the month and then you always have a chance to go back. And I use this in concert with my Google calendar, so I can always search back. I might not remember the person's name, but I'll remember everything else about them, and I'll be able to search my drive and find the person so that I can follow up forever.

So tell me what you do again. Well, what do you do? Because we live in the information age Friends, we shouldn't have to use our voice to learn that. We can just look it up. So here's what you're gonna put on that Recon sheet, AKA Google Doc with their name on top. You're going to Google them or use any kind of AI out there, right?

I love perplexity.ai. No, I'm not an affiliate. They're just amazing. I'm pretty sure most of it's free. and just look up their name. Find out what's important to them. Where have they been? What are, what have they done? Uh, good, bad, or indifferent. You're getting context and that makes all the difference.

That's the first thing. Google them for lack of better phrasing, but you could also run their name through ai. Do it for yourself too. See where you come up. It's pretty interesting. I always like doing that. Do a little gut check. A little SEO check. All right. Second thing you're gonna put on this doc after their name and the Google search is all their social handles.

Like hit reply to one of the emails. Hey, looking forward to our call on date and time. Join your email list. Love what you're sharing, right? I mean, obviously you have to be truthful. Look them up on podcast players like Spotify, apple Podcasts, et cetera. You'd be surprised even if they don't have a podcast, they might have had one in the past or have been on one.

And then you can listen to the episode 72 of this other person's podcast when they were a guest. It's really enlightening to hear them introduce themselves or be introduced, talk about the topics that they like to talk about. Even if you just grab the transcript, it's so enlightening. Again, you don't wanna spend hours and hours on this research.

I cannot emphasize this enough. You don't wanna waste your time or theirs being like, so tell me what you do. It's such a, that's, that's, that just shows laziness. And you're not lazy, so don't do that. And PS you're also, you're not stalking them, you're studying them, you're preparing, you are doing your due diligence.

They're doing some kind of little, you know, mom FBI, agent sleuthing. Why? So they can get some context so they can then. Decide what they're gonna do next because context matters. So this makes you more prepared, more confident, and instantly more memorable. Let me give you a little sample here. If you get on the phone with someone and you've sent them an email or two, you've been looking them up, you hit reply to their email, you showed up, uh, on their LinkedIn or on their other social channels.

Money. So it's not disingenuous. It's your way to get a fuller picture so that you can help them faster so that you don't waste your time on these calls in an hour, within an hour or worse. More on these discovery calls or free calls. So here's the deal. On Friday, I'm gonna walk you through the full structure of the call.

What to say, what not to say. How to make the offer feel like a gift, not a gamble. And so go fill out your first recon sheet. Do it on me. You could do it on me. Hey, maybe we'll have a call. One day. Point is do it yourself. The point is, is you, you get practice. Practice doing this. You will find value. I guarantee you.

See you Friday.