Want clients? Don’t make this discovery call mistake! Did you ever have a conversation with someone and then spend the next day saying, “Did that really happen?”
That was me, after my crazy strange discovery call with a potential hire we’ll call Jane.
I was super interested in hiring Jane for a pretty important role in my business. I needed someone I could trust to help get the Free Mama Movement in front of more mamas, because there are still women out there who don’t know about the options they have.
Jane had great connections, and on paper, everything looked good. When we set up the call, I made it clear that I was a hot lead, very interested in hiring her. Basically, the job was hers to lose — and boy, did she lose it.
Jane started the call by revealing some fairly personal information, which was entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I care deeply about the women on my team. They can come to me when they’re struggling, they can always feel free to share with me. But that’s after I hire them.
Don’t open a conversation with a potential client with your financial or romantic struggles — especially if you’re planning to say, “Hey, I really need you to pay me because I have these issues.”
But Jane wasn’t done. She spent the next fifty minutes talking about herself (the call was booked as a 20-minute slot). She didn’t ask one question about my business.
In a discovery call, you should be listening. You should be asking questions. You should not be telling your potential client about the many ways you’ve been wronged by your partner or your plans for revenge.
But Jane still wasn’t done. She proceeded to tell me about a new course she wants to launch and how it would be just fantastic and really helpful to her if I could get it in front of my audience.
Got that? On our discovery call — where I was trying to hire Jane — she tried to get me to agree to sell her course to my audience.
Yeah. It was weird for me, too.
And yet despite the extreme weirdness of the call, in an effort to convince myself I hadn’t just thrown away nearly an hour, I asked Jane to please follow up with me about the actual work I wanted to hire her to do. She promised that she would.
But she didn’t.
I never heard from her.
Seriously, Mama, do not do this. Don’t make this discovery call mistake. Follow up with people. Deliver the information you’ve promised. Do what you say you’ll do. It seems super basic… but you’d be surprised at how many people get this wrong.
A six-figure business starts with listening — and the fortune is definitely in the followup. Look for more on that next week.
P.S. Want to learn the right way to run a discovery call? I’ve got a great video for you on FreeMamaTV!