How To Have Sales Calls That Get Clients To Book
Today, we’re talking all about how to have successful sales calls that get clients to book. We polled our audience on Instagram (follow us if don’t already!) and out of four options this was the favorite.
Keep reading to learn all our tips and strategies about sales calls!
1. WHY YOU SHOULD BE HAVING SALES CALLS
If you’re not having sales (or “discovery”) calls with potential clients, you’re leaving a lot of money and opportunities on the table.
Why? Because having a call with a potential client gives you the opportunity to:
Connect with the client on a personal level (aka gain their trust and build a relationship).
Get their full attention when you share what makes your service so valuable.
Build momentum and excitement and make them feel like “wow this is really happening! I’m ready to do this!”
Ask the right questions so you can know if you’re a good fit, and understand what the client needs and what their budget is so you can price accordingly.
By NOT having sales calls and just sending blind proposals or pre-made package options to clients, you are likely:
Underpricing the project and leaving thousands of dollars on the table.
Missing key deliverables they may have needed for their project that you weren’t aware of because you didn’t ask, therefore again missing out on potential income.
Not connecting with the client personally, so they have no problem ghosting you after you send your proposal.
When we first started our design business, we weren’t doing sales calls, and guess what? We got ghosted ALL THE TIME.
We weren’t giving our clients a personal and elevated experience, we weren’t asking the right questions, and we weren’t giving them a reason to want to follow through. Now, we have a pretty high success rate with sales calls, and we’re able to secure higher-priced projects.
Also, it’s not that we’re suddenly working with clients with bigger budgets. We believe many past clients we tried to secure likely had big budgets too --we just weren’t doing a good job of making the sale, therefore losing those potential clients, or booking them for extremely low rates because we were too afraid to ask for more.
Which brings us to our next point...
2. LEAVE YOUR FEAR, DOUBT, AND INSECURITIES BEHIND
We get it, selling can feel scary! If you’re new to sales, it can feel like you’re being pushy or offensive when asking clients about their goals, needs, budgets, etc.
It’s important when going into sales calls to act like the authority. Your client is coming to you for your expertise, so you have to act like the expert, even if you don’t feel like it quite yet!
Most of our clients are older than us, sometimes twice our age. Whenever our imposter syndrome or fear about our age comes up, we just have to remind ourselves that these women still chose to work with us because we have a unique skill and outlook that they wanted to hire us for.
So just remember, even if you don’t feel like an expert yet, your client came to you for a reason, and you have something unique to offer that they are seeking.
3. WHAT QUESTIONS TO ASK ON THE CALL
Now that you understand why sales calls are so beneficial and know to do some mindset work around becoming an expert, it’s time to provide you with tangible tools for what to say on your sales calls!
Some important big-picture questions to ask include…
What are some of your biggest short-term and long-term goals for your business?
Why do you feel like now is a good time to invest in design services?
Are there any main hurdles or problems you’ve been running into?
And then you’ll want to ask lots of practical questions to nail down the project scope, like…
How do you feel about your current branding?
Do you have an aesthetic vision or style you are leaning toward for your new designs?
Are there any additional collateral items things you see yourself needing/using?
How many web design pages are we planning for?
Will the website need any special features or functionalities?
At the end of the call, you can then ask about their budget and timeline and share a range their project proposal will likely fall into.
P.S. - We always hop on a zoom call with potential clients, but we don’t share our screens. We’ll keep our sales call questions doc off to the side on our desktop and will type notes into it throughout the call.
4. HOW TO INTEGRATE SALES CALLS INTO YOUR PROCESS
CLARIFY YOUR MESSAGING
We recommend starting with the messaging and calls to action on your website and Instagram bio. Make sure that all of your CTA’s say something like “book a call with us”, “book an into call”, “book a discovery call”, etc., and that the CTA links to your contact page with a form for the client to fill out.
For inspiration on what to include in your forms, you can look at ours here.
TOOLS FOR SCHEDULING CALLS
We created our contact form through Honeybook, our client management system, which has a code you can insert onto your website. Then, anytime a client inquires, we get an email about it, and the inquiry pops up as a new client project in Honeybook for us. Honeybook is great too because it integrates with our Google Calendar and will generate Zoom call links and put them on our calendar for us.
If you don’t have Honeybook, you can use our link for a free trial (no credit card required) and get 50% off your first year with HoneyBook!
As an alternative, you can also use Calendly to have clients schedule calls based on time slots you’ve set aside for meetings. Calendly also connects with Google Calendar, and integrates with Google Meet to generate call links.
Or, you could simply have a contact form on your website and then manually go back and forth with your client by email after they inquire to schedule a call time. This one is a little more time consuming, but works just fine if you don’t want to use the other systems.
PRE-CALL PREP
Before our discovery/sales calls, we will brush up on the information the client sent us in their inquiry message about their business, what their needs/goals/problems are if they shared any, and we’ll browse through their social media and website if they shared them.
This way we can get a feel for what could be improved and what services we could offer them.
5. WHAT TO DO AFTER THE CALL TO GET YOUR CLIENT TO BOOK
After the sales call, you’re going to put together a custom proposal for them. We recommend having a pre-made proposal template stashed away in your files to copy and use each time you need to send a new proposal. This will save you soooo much time.
A Good rule of thumb is to send the proposal to the client within 24 hours of the sales call in order to keep the momentum and excitement. This is when a client is most likely to commit to booking.
For delivering the proposal, we usually email the client with a Loom link, which links to a view recording we’ve made by screensharing the proposal PDF on our computer and walking them through each section.
Now, you can either set a timeframe for how long the proposal offer is valid, or leave it open for the client to respond any time. We prefer to give the client a due date for when we need an answer by, as it helps move things along quicker.
How this works for us: In the video and in the email we send with the proposal video link, we’ll let the client know that if they book with us within 24 hours, we can offer a $200 discount (and we’ll just add $200 to the full project cost initially so that we’re not really charging any less than we normally would but it is a discount for them if they book now rather than coming back 2 weeks later with an answer).
However you decide to approach this is up to you, and you may choose to only do this “discount” method when you’re really trying hard to book a client, and be more casual other times if you’re already pretty booked up. It just depends on what feels good to you!
YOU’VE GOT THIS!
If you’ve made it this far, you’re well on your way to becoming a pro at having successful sales calls and booking clients consistently! We know you can do this. It takes practice, but the more you do it, the more naturally it will come to you.
Once you start practicing your sales techniques, you’re going to be able to start charging higher for your services, because you will know how to sell the vision of the success you could bring to your clients and help them see the value you provide.
This is possible for you!