Should you do free consultations?

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: I get a lot of questions about should you do free or discounted consultations so let's talk about how do you manage that this video is brought to you by Appy Pie’s Academy.  it is a huge waste of time unless you are new or you're not overbooked with clients if you are relatively new or first-time entrepreneur I would strongly actually recommend that you do free consultations and discounted consultations because actually what's really going to be happening is that people are going to be getting on the phone with you and you're going to be learning how to sell and learning about your customers and their needs so that on the next call and the next call and the next call you're gonna sell better because if you do spend the time and establish your relationships you do increase your sale conversion rate so getting on the call is valuable it's just sometimes if you don't convert enough people it ends up being a big waste of time but if you are able to convert at a higher rate once you become a good sales person then it's really really helpful to your business and you can get a lot of cheap leads on a site like Fiverr calm where you can set up basic 15-minute or 30-minute introductory calls for five dollars or something like that or clarity FM where people can pay you per minute so they can get you for 10 minutes 15 minutes it's not too expensive for them and you basically get them to pay you to sell more things to them of course you have to help them you do have to be immensely helpful and insightful when you're on the call with them otherwise they're just not going to engage further so you have to in on this call show that you're a fantastic expert great professional friendly and easy to work with and you have to make them want to work with you further and don't have the call for too long 30 minutes might be the longest I like 15 minutes and 15 minutes you can answer a few questions and explain what the next steps are once you have demand that grows you have you have a few options to handle that you can hire salespeople like extras have to take these calls it wouldn't be you anymore but you would give them approximate scripts because after you've become really good at this kind of sales you give your staff approximate scripts and explain to them what to say when and how to manage the conversation so that they can maintain a sales rate as high as the one that you had or if you don't want to hire sales staff you can just increase your consultation prices so instead of free you can charge a little more or if you're already charging a small rate you can charge a little more than that and of course the word free is something to think about free usually means less value some people don't use that word at all some people say complimentary session kind of implies you know like part of the purchase it just that free itself often carries kind of this negative association and people think well if you're giving away your free time you must not be busy enough or you might have a small practice so some people don't care about the word free but to some people it has a negative ring so you might want to in your own business process just use the word complimentary session instead of free session the problem with it free or complimentary is that people will take advantage of your time so you have to find a way to limit the people who take advantage of course one way to limit it is to charge as little as five dollars then most of the people who don't care that much will just never even buy the five-dollar thing and you know those weren't good potential customers anyway for the most part another tactic is to give them a questionnaire before getting on the free session it's something maybe very easy to fill out a few questions but if they don't fill out you know they weren't even that serious at least most of them so if they didn't make that effort then you wouldn't spend that time with them so that's the approximate a-to-z of how to handle free sessions how to make a little money from them how to sell from them and how to become a better salesperson from them and how to manage them throughout the lifecycle of the maturity of your business.