[00:00:00] Welcome back to Selling Your Expertise, the podcast where we turn conversations into clients without weird pitches or pushy sales tactics. I'm your host, Renee Hribar, and today we're talking about the sales call Thunderbolts, right? Rain waves crashing. A lot of people that I work with are absolutely terrified and we'll do anything to avoid this, even though it is the only place where they're actually going to make money, and that is okay. That is why you're here. So if you're a consultant, you build dashboards, you're a tech expert, I want you to know that if you've ever felt like you going to freeze, if you had to talk to somebody on the phone and do a quote unquote sales call, you're in the right place.

Because it's not just what you say on the call, but what you do before [00:01:00] the call to stack the odds in your favor, right? If you've ever watched, may the odds be ever in your favor. Okay, great. And so now I'm losing the name of the movie. You'll remember. You'll remind me. You'll tell me what it is. I can't think of it right now.

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.

Dream University. Diane was faced with a completely empty [00:02:00] house for the first time in 30 years. She and her husband had made great memories raising their three daughters in this home. These memories were even more precious when her husband passed away and the kids, oh, they were so gutted and it just took so much out of them.

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.

So these are great memories, right? She tried to feel better, but nothing was working. She claims she read every book in the self-help section of Barnes and Noble. She had tried support groups, she had tried church groups and nothing was filling the void. [00:03:00] She found a life coach and had such. A transformation that she applied to become a life coach and went through a rigorous year long program to become certified.

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.

I mean, it was the script that they gave her, the amount of time that they encouraged her to spend with the person on the phone, and then awkwardly fumbling into a $7,000 pitch. It was exhausting for everyone. The spoiler alert, it wasn't working. So [00:04:00] once Diane learned how to do pre-call research and how to send pre-call emails and how to offer a tiny paid step before the big invitation.

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.

If you can really just hold onto that for a moment before you ever say hello. So if you've ever been told or had advice or been shared a long pitch that came with a certification, this, I see this all the time. It's not just, it wasn't just her life coach certification program. It, it was, it's, it seems to be so many certification programs, [00:05:00] so many.

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.

And it is really just a Google doc in my world. It's your pre-call prep doc, right? But here's what you're gonna put on there. You're gonna put [00:06:00] the person's name, you're gonna have maybe a naming convention, right? Like the person's name, the type of call, the date, and these are going to go, if you're working with me, if you're listening to what I'm encouraging you to do, they're gonna go in a Google folder.

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.

Right? If you've been listening along with a podcast, you know that I'm all about following up forever. So this recon sheet. Gives me context. It is. As my pre-call prep doc, it is my chance to get a fuller picture so that once I'm on the phone with someone, whether it's a pure discovery call or quote unquote, just a coffee chat, the first 10 minutes or worse, the first or the entire 30 minutes [00:07:00] isn't going.

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.

I don't care [00:08:00] whether you sell business to business or business to consumer, everybody has a social footprint. Now, before there were social media channels, there was public information, public information like land documents, ownership documents. There's so many things that we had to search for and buy information around before the information age.

We have it so easy, but yet people still aren't doing it. And I just really know it's not because they're not good people, it's because they just didn't know any better. So now you're listening to this and now you know better. Please spread the word. Share this with your friends. Get their social channels and any other things like public. Information that you can gather. Look at what groups they're in. Look at who they follow, what else could you learn about them so that you can ask meaningful questions when you actually have the opportunity to speak to them. And then if they run a business. If [00:09:00] they have an email list, join their email list and then actually engage with it.

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.

It's meant to be precursory and it's meant to be quick. So if you're like me and you've got a DHD set a timer, and that's literally what my whole life is, is setting timers. I set timers so that I can work in time blocks, [00:10:00] so look them up on podcast players. And listen to what they have to say. Another great place is YouTube put their name into YouTube.

They might have had a channel in 2008. You never know what you might find. I, I always tease about the, hey, they might have had a cat channel or a crochet channel or something freaking awesome, you know, like something else. So. You never know. The point is, is you're getting context and do this before you get on any call.

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.

I mean, even look at this like, you know, I, I have a child who is. Soccer. And so there's a lot of soccer sideline conversations with other moms. [00:11:00] And anytime there's anybody else, like on the other team, for example, we'll be like, okay, what's that person's last name? Immediately somebody in the group is picking up their phone and putting that last name into Google or some other search, you know, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn.

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.

Intentionally with kindness, with praise, and then you get on the call and you say, Hey, I read your last article. I love the part when you said it about this, [00:12:00] you stand out. Who else is doing that? Almost nobody. You know who's doing that? People that make money, that's who's doing that. The people that make.

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.