An atrociously manipulative sales script
Back when we were trying to grow our online coaching business, we worked with a business mentor who gave us an atrociously manipulative sales script.
He actually said this, and I’m not kidding:
“Tears are encouraged during the call”.
And he was bragging about having made a single mother remortgage her house so that she could pay for his fat loss transformation program. I'm ashamed to say that we tried his script for a couple of weeks and it just didn't sit well with us, because we're not utter psychopaths. But the question here is:
Do sales calls work, and should you be using them in your business?
As always, it depends. There's nothing wrong with sales calls as a thing, but they often get misused.
The advantages of sales calls
One advantage of sales calls is the human touch. Sometimes, in the age of complex funnels and squeeze pages, chat bots and email automations, you just want to speak to an actual person.
They're also great for complex products, where the buying process isn't as simple as just pressing ‘yes’ on a checkout page. But sales calls come with significant disadvantages.
The disadvantages
The main disadvantage is that it pressures people into buying.
People who buy on emotion are not the kind of people that you want to have as customers.
Secondly, they're time-consuming. In one of our other videos, we talk about the £100-an-hour rule. If you don't filter people correctly, it'll work out as far less than that.
They're also exhausting, and you're opening up your calendar to any number of potential time wasters – which takes time away from you actually growing your business.
Luckily, there is a way to get all of the sweet nectar and juices of a sales call without any of these disadvantages.
Let your content do the selling for you
The new way of doing this is to let your content do the selling for you. That way, you're qualifying people ahead of time before they even get onto the call so that by the time you speak to them, it's not even a sales call.
They're already sold on you, and the whole purpose of the call is to make sure that your product can solve their problem.
The whole dynamic is flipped, because often you're the one saying no to them if it's not a good fit.
Following this method, you’re not going to be scraping the barrel of every possible sale that you could get. But are those barrel-scraping sales ones that you necessarily want?
Probably not.
Doing it this way, you don’t have to worry so much about regret purchases and refund requests, and the whole thing is a lot smoother.
The problem with pushy sales tactics
There are business coaches that will tell you the opposite. They will recommend pushy sales tactics to get every possible sale at the highest possible price, and make people buy on emotion. In our opinion, that isn't a strategy that’s ethical or sustainable, and it's going to give you a headache further down the line.
Going back to what I said about the content doing the selling for you, I'm going to break the fourth wall here and tell you that that's exactly what we're doing in this article right now.
So, when do we use sales calls?
We no longer use them routinely for our low-priced fitness products, but we might do for one-on-one training. It's a more complex problem with a higher price, and it's usually easier than going back and forth through long email chains.
Luckily, we're in the position where we don't need every possible sale.
We prefer to work with people who resonate with us, and our content makes sure of that.
The Jobs to be Done Framework
The ‘Jobs to be Done’ framework suggests that the size of the results that you're promising determines the price that you can charge.
Fixing the tap in somebody's sink? That's a £100 problem. Sending a rocket into space? That's a £50,000,000 problem. But helping someone get rid of their bingo wings isn’t exactly a £5,000 problem. So the call is not to get the sale; it's to check the job that needs doing, what the problem is that they have, and if your product can solve it for them.
When you go to the doctor with a headache, he doesn't need to sell you anything. You have a problem, and you trust him to solve it. If he started asking whether he could interest you in an appendicectomy, at 50% off for a limited time, you’d probably (and hopefully) say no.
You’re already sold on him being able to solve your problem before you even step into the clinic. That's partly because of his content strategy, which in this case is your trust in the institution of modern medicine. So if you want to lose fat or gain muscle, then you can do that for less than £100 (self-service) on our website.
If you want help with your business, and the job to be done is quite simple – let's say you're just starting out and you just need to get customers in through the door – then we have a cheap self-service option for that which you can read about here.
If you want to build a semi-automated, scalable business, then that's a more complex problem. That's something that we would speak to you about over the phone to find out how you work and make sure that we can help you with it.
If it's a big result with lots of moving parts, and it's not one-size-fits-all approach, then you need more communication with someone before making a decision about whether to buy something.
So, that's how to make sales calls work in your business.
Find out more
If you want to delve even deeper, we have a full walkthrough with every one of our systems laid out in full detail and how you can do the same in your coaching. You can visit the link to download this and find out more about how to turn your business into a semi-automated machine to give you the freedom to coach online full-time.
To find out how we could help you grow your online personal training business, book in a call here.