How Calling Customers Drastically Improved My Business

One of the most important things for any business is its customers. Without customers, that business will fail very quickly. There are many ways for a business to acquire customers, and I’ve tested a lot of them. I’ve recently been testing out a new way which is similar to cold calling — except the leads weren’t so cold, and they were expecting my call.

This is by no means a new concept; it was only new to me. I had never really called anyone to get a sale. In fact, I found it hard calling a restaurant to make a booking! I was not a fan of speaking on the phone, but I knew this was very important and if I could master it, or even get good at it, I could bring in a whole new wave of sales.

This is a very time-consuming task and it’s only worth it if what you’re selling covers the time of speaking to people on the phone. Let’s say each phone call lasts on average 30 minutes, and 1 in 4 people buy. You need to make sure that what you’re selling is worth two hours of your time.

You may be wondering how I can guarantee that when I call someone, they’ll be willing to speak to me for 30 minutes and not hang up after 30 seconds. That’s in the process of how I get the phone call. I’ll explain that soon.

For now, let’s talk about the offer. For us, our $697 course is a great offer. When we become slightly busier and our time becomes more valuable, we will be able to outsource to people who can make these phone calls and we will do the $3,000 coaching offer phone calls ourselves. At the moment, though, based on four calls for one sale, we would be earning $348.50 per hour doing these calls, which seems pretty good. Another thing to note: you can get the vibe whether someone is interested or not in the first ten minutes from their tone, their questions, and their story.

How Do I Get These Calls?

I have set up a landing page, a bit like a sales page, with the information about the phone call:

I have put a lot of value on the page, and the price that I would normally charge. By making a proper landing page, and by outlining the offer and what you’ll cover in the call, you are increasing the chances of people setting up a call in the first place and you’re also increasing the chances of them actually showing up to the call. After they click the button saying “Set up a Strategy Call”, they immediately get redirected to a survey:

It’s a very simple eight-question survey with mostly tick-box answers. This survey takes about 2 minutes and 37 seconds, on average, to complete. The reason for the survey is that I only want to speak to people who are serious and willing to put in a bit of time to get the call. Otherwise, that statistic of one sale in four calls would turn into one sale in 12 calls. After they complete the survey, they get automatically redirected again — this time to a calendar page where they can pick a time I am free and schedule a call.

You can see this isn’t really like cold-calling; they are quite warm leads at this point. However, it is much easier to get someone to sign up for a strategy call and closing them on the phone than it is closing them directly from your adverts or social media.

I will promote these phone calls on my YouTube videos, Instagram account, Quora profile, Facebook page, and sometimes on LinkedIn. On average, I get a few thousand views across these channels in a month without any paid advertising, which can typically result in 2–6 phone calls in a day, depending on the day and my availability.

Once someone has signed up for a strategy call, I will send them a WhatsApp message to the number they provided. We used to do these calls via Zoom but found that WhatsApp was getting a much better show-up rate. The message will say hello, mention the time, mention one of their struggles (I know from the survey), and offer my reassurance that I’ll be able to help them in said problem on the phone.

The Phone Call

When the time comes to call the prospect, make sure you are not late! Punctuality is vital! I usually start the call by introducing myself, asking them to tell me a bit about them, their story, what made them set up this call, and then I ask them what questions they have and what’s stopping them from taking action.

You don’t necessarily want to fully answer all their questions on the phone, as they then won’t have a reason to buy. Instead, you want them to know you can answer all their questions and that you can answer the remaining questions and help them further in the course/training/coaching. You want to introduce them to your offer and explain to them why you think it will be valuable for them. There will usually be objections to joining. If there aren’t, you’re lucky and the call should be easy; however, if there are objections then that’s fine. You simply have to answer their objections until there aren’t any left, and that’s it.

We also offer a discount on the phone then and there which enables people to take action immediately. In the case of them really not wanting to buy at the moment, you could then ask if they’d be willing to leave a very small deposit to guarantee this price and bonus, so when they are ready to buy they only have to pay the remainder and the original offer will still be on the table.

These are my steps to calling prospects, and as I have said in the title, it’s drastically changed my business and myself. Calling people on the phone isn’t scary anymore; I just do it. I hope this has helped, and if you’re not incorporating calling prospects in your business, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.