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Many self-employed academics use the phone to connect with clients and grow their business. In today’s episode, we’re presenting a nine-step framework for application calls or strategy sessions. Also known as hello calls or discovery calls, these connections make it easier to support your clients and sell your products and services without using a sales page or funnel sequence.
What is an Application Call?
Unlike sales pages or email sequences, application calls are active ways for potential clients or customers to connect with you. You get them interested in your service or your product through the material you create. Then you have a call, a one-on-one discussion with them.
You see this a lot in coaching businesses, where you have a sales call or a strategy session or consultant call to just help them get started and see if they’re the right fit for your business and vice versa. These calls give value to your customers and let you ensure that your service or product is right for them.
Now let’s get into five key benefits of these types of calls.
Benefit #1: They’re Easy to Set Up
All you need is calendar and video software. If you add a calendar to your site, people can see when you’re available. Regarding video, most people use Zoom but you can also use Skype or whatever other program you’re familiar with.
Benefit #2: You Can Use Them for Services Under Development
You can’t use a sales page for a product or service that isn’t ready yet, but if you’re talking to them by phone, you can say,”This is step one, two and three that you need to follow to get from point A to point B” before saying at the end of the call, “Listen, I’m working on a course for this right now, it’s just a 31 page document. It has five modules. There’s no fluff. It just gets you the result you want. Are you interested?” If they say, “Yes,” you can say, “Okay, well, great. Here’s a PayPal link for $97 (or $297, whatever it is). I’ll send you the product. It’s much easier to sell those early-stage products and services using these types of calls.
Benefit #3: You Can Filter Your Clients (and Vice-Versa)
Application calls let you filter your clients (and vice-versa) early in the process. You can confirm that it’s a mutual good fit before someone starts paying. For example, if you have a graphic design service, maybe you need clients to have a website before you can create a brand for them. You can put a checkbox in that call and say, “Hey, do you have a website? Oh, you don’t have a website. Well, the service isn’t really the right fit for you right now.” Then you can point them somewhere where they could go and find that help.
Benefit #4: You Can Get a Lot of Customer Insights
This is probably the biggest long-term benefit for growing your business: you gain a ton of insights about your customer. If you have a sales page and you send a hundred people to the sales page and five people buy, that tells you something about conversion rates and button color and font selection and all that stuff. But you don’t gain a ton of insights about your customers.
If you do five calls directly with your customer and help them with their biggest challenges, you’re gaining insights in every call. We call this the customer insight register. You make a big list of these insights as you go and you’ll start to see the commonalities. You’ll then be able to further develop your products and services moving forward.
Benefit #5: You Improve With Time
If you go back to the example of the sales page, the one where you have a hundred people come and five people buy, you don’t know if your offer is completely off the mark. If you have a couple of phone calls and take some notes at the end and say, “What did I do well in this phone call? What did I do wrong? What benefits resonated with them and which ones didn’t?” These self-reviews help you improve your offer, your business and improve yourself.
Insights from the Self-Tenured Community
We reached out to members of the Self-Tenure Community who use application calls and strategy sessions.
- Cheryl Lau from cheryllau.com, who appeared in Episodes #53 and #54, says that she uses these calls to collect market research, practice her selling skills, make new connections and maybe sign on a client, all with these types of calls.
- Dr. Caitlin Faas from caitlinfaas.com, who appeared in Episode #56, says that she gets quality time with another person who is really interested in self-development and growth. She sees these calls as a great opportunity to help people move forward in their business and their life.
- Dr. Emily Roberts from personalfinanceforphds.com., who appeared in Episode #17, says that she gained stronger and more personal connections with members of her audience, which increases like, know and trust. She says that sometimes coaching isn’t the right fit, so she will direct them to one of her products that they hadn’t considered.
What is the Nine-Step Framework?
If you think of a three by three by three grid, the first three steps are before the call. The second three steps are during the call and the last three steps are after the call. The top three boxes in this matrix then are find, fill out and filter. The middle three steps are set up, serve and soft sell. The bottom three steps after the call are, review, follow up and referral request.
Step One: Find
This is where you help people find your ‘Book a Call’ link. The simplest way to do this is to have a button on your website that says something like ‘Book a Call,’ ‘Book a Strategy Session,’ or ‘Book Consultant Call.’ You can also include a PS at the end of your emails, saying, “If you want to jump on a call with me, here’s the link to do that.” You can do social sharing or you send it in your email digests or newsletters. These are all great ways to help people find your link and click through to set up that call.
Step Two: Survey
Jennifer van Alstyne, the Academic Designer, who was on Episode #71, sends people a survey after they book a call. You can send these questions to learn about them, to gather information, and make sure they are the right fit. Where are they today? What are they looking to achieve? What challenges are they having?
Step Three: Filter
If they’re not the right person for you, you’re not the right person for them, or if they don’t have some of the prerequisites for working with you. Maybe you’re a resume editor and they don’t have a first draft. You can respond and say, “Hey, you’re not at the right stage for the editing phase right now, so I’ve canceled the call but here’s someone you can connect with. They will be able to help you with this step.”
Step Four: Set Up
The big point here is to use a tool that can handle, booking, canceling and rescheduling calls for you. You can use Calendly, Acuity or another software that lets them see your availability and bypass all those back and forth emails.
Step Five: Serve
Once they call, you want to help them with their challenges and give them your best advice. There are some introduction questions you can use to break the ice before asking questions like “What do you want to achieve? What are you looking to do? What have you tried? Where are you at today?” Then the questions transition to “What challenges are you having and how can we break those?”
We call this the then, now, how framework. Where do you want to go? That’s the then. Where are you at now? That’s the now part. The how is the challenges you are having getting there. Then you come up with a three-step plan to help them get through the next three steps to reaching those goals.
Step Six: Soft Sell
The whole point of this call is not to have a really strong sales process at the end. It’s the complete opposite. The best thing is saying at the end, “Where would you like to go from here?” or “What’s the next step?” If they say, “Well, this has been awesome. I know the next three things I need to do to address my challenges and get where I want to go. How do I do more of this? What do you offer that can help me?” you can say, “Well, I have a product that’s a five-module course. It’s $97 (or $597, or whatever it is). Here’s how to get access to it.”
Step Seven: Review
Review how the call went. Make a couple of notes using the ‘then, now, how’ framework. Make a couple of bullet point notes on each step. You also want to review how you did. What did you feel went really well on the call? What did you feel went not as well? What didn’t seem to resonate with them? What, if anything, are you going to change for the next call?
Step Eight: Follow Up
Send them a quick follow-up email and say, “Hey, this is what we talked about. This is where you’re at today. This is where you’d like to go. These are the three step plans that we developed to get you there, with the challenges that you’re having. This is what we talked about and the next step might be…”
If they didn’t ask you for the next step, then this is a great spot to say, “By the way, I have a coaching program” or “By the way, I have this product or the service that you can access and here’s where you can find out more.”
Step Nine: Referral Request
We rarely see this step in these kinds of coaching applications but it is really important to include it. The book [Affiliate] ‘Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got’ by Jay Abraham has a really important chapter on setting up an automatic referral system for your business.
Send them a follow-up email and say, “Hey, do you know anyone else who might be interested in doing one of these calls?” This is a great way to feed all the way back up to the top of the matrix and find new customers. You’ll find that many of these people reply and even might send you two or three contacts. As your referrals start ramping up more, you’ll find that you don’t need the lead generation on the front end to get these calls going anymore.
Conclusion
This nine-step framework can help you make the most of your application calls and strategy sessions. If you have questions or feedback about this episode, please leave a comment below. If you use these systems already, how are they going for you? Please share!
