How I Prep for a Sales Call to Land 5-Figure Design Projects
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Links mentioned in today’s show:
Episode 109: The Psychology of Selling Ft. My Personal Sales Coach, Gwen Tinsley
Episode 150: Why Aren’t They Buying? How to Fix the Sales Slump
What if the key to a successful sales call is not just about selling, but about truly understanding your client’s deepest needs? This episode of The Branding Business School Podcast takes you behind the scenes of how Victoria prepares for calls that average around $10,000 per project. By sharing insights from personal experiences and lessons from a seasoned sales coach, she highlights the crucial role of effective sales preparation and the power of building trust through a well-crafted sales experience.
This conversation dives into the importance of intake forms, industry research and using tailored visual guides during discovery calls to resonate with clients. By aligning examples from your portfolio with client needs, Victoria illustrates how building trust and showcasing value can set you apart in a competitive market.
Mastering the art of discovery calls and follow-ups, this episode wraps up with practical advice on how to maintain control over the sales process. Learn the importance of securing a verbal commitment before sending proposals and being the last to follow up, which can significantly enhance your close rate. Victoria also underlines the importance of personal connections, encouraging quick, personalized follow-up messages to reinforce client rapport. By understanding client hesitations and strategically timing proposal submissions, you can increase the likelihood of securing your sales and becoming the go-to expert in your industry without losing your sanity.
High Ticket Offers Require High Touch Preparation
Customers who were ready to say yes are walking away, not because they didn’t need what you offer, but because the sales experience didn’t meet their expectations or it didn’t calm their fears. If we don’t prepare for our sales calls with the same intention and excellence that we prepare for our services or an Instagram reel, we are missing potentially the most important piece of the puzzle.
Step 1: Intake Form
If you get on a sales call blindly, you are not going to be able to control the direction of that call. On your website, you need to have a custom inquiry form that asks the questions that you need to know before you get on a discovery call with someone. Here are some questions that Victoria asks her potential clients at BrandWell: Email, Name, Phone Number. These are obvious, but crucial questions to ask if you want to be able to follow up with your leads. Additional questions include; what design services they are interested in, to provide a summary of their business and how they help people, and have they invested in custom design before. Other information to gather would be a link to their website, a range of how much their current services are, and why it’s important to them to have a professionally designed brand or website.
Step 2: Research
If they provide a link to their website or social media, review them, not just for what they post, but for their tone and their energy behind it. You can build a picture of who they are and how they are currently showing up. From there Victoria makes note on whether there is room for their brand to grow or to improve and she takes notes along the way. If you don’t already know the pricing of their services, then review that on their website as well. Knowing their pricing can help you speak to ROI, return on investment, and when you’re selling a high ticket offer, ROI does matter. After researching the prospective client, it is time to do some research in the industry that that client works within. Victoria does this for two reasons: one, to determine if their current website is industry standard and whether or not that’s hurting or helping them, and two, so that she can pick out which websites or brands she wants to pull from her portfolio to show on the video call. It is powerful to not just talk about your work on a discovery call, but to actually show it, and to show it when you’re on the same call as them. Taking the time to hand select projects that you know are going to align with them not only builds their trust in you as the expert who has helped others get to where they want to go, but it also shows that you’re invested in the conversation.
Step 3: Visual Guide
This visual guide is beautifully branded, created in Canva, and allows you to walk a client through who you are and what your approach looks like. At BrandWell, Victoria and her COO, Lauren, have three different Canva decks for the three different packages that BrandWell offers. Each guide breaks down who they are at BrandWell, what their approach to design looks like, what their process is, what the timeline looks like, the deliverables that are provided, and of course the investment. Victoria and Lauren talk face-to-face with every client about the investment before hanging up and by including this in the visual guide, it almost forces you to talk about what is arguably one of the most important parts of that call. This is when you can actually ask the questions on how interested they are in moving forward or talk to them more about the ROI to help calm the fears that someone may have. Make them voice their fears and then, if you can, try to address them to the best of your ability. In order to do this, you must first make sure you really believe in what you’re selling before you sell it hard.
The most important part of having this visual guide is that you set the tone, you’re holding the authority, and you’re leading the call. The goal is to position ourselves as the expert and that needs to start the moment that they have interaction with you.
Step 4: Video Call
It is time to meet with the client via a video call. Video is stressed here because it’s essential. The ability to see someone’s face, read their body language, catch the moment that their eyes light up or the moment that their eyes seem to hesitate, that’s the kind of information that you cannot get through written text. Another reason to do video calls is that it decreases the amount of times in which you get ghosted. If you’re spending 30 minutes to an hour on a video call with someone, you are building a relationship and that is going to add a layer of accountability to the person on the other end of the call. When scheduling your video calls, make sure you’re allowing enough time for the call. Schedule for more time than what’s probably even needed, because you don’t want to be halfway through your presentation and the client has to go because you only scheduled a 20 minute block for them. Victoria prefers to have at least 5 to 10 minutes at the end of the call where she can stop sharing her screen, look them in the eye, and ask them point blank, how are you feeling about all this? From there you can gauge the kind of urgency they have, or their excitement level, and you can talk about anything that they may need to address before they’re going to feel confident moving forward.
Asking for the Sale
Having the ability to say, “are you ready to move forward”, or “do you feel confident”, is such a valuable part of the sales process. If they’re not ready to move forward now, they’re going to tell you on the call and now you just saved yourself time following up with them later, or risking getting ghosted. Having the time built into the end of the call where you ask them if they’re ready is a necessary conversation that needs to take place.
The Proposal
At BrandWell, Victoria does not send a proposal until she gets a verbal commitment. Once you send the proposal, the ball is entirely in their court, and you are no longer in control. If they are not able to give you that verbal commitment then you figure out why. Ask them “what is your hesitation?’. If they have other options that they are looking at, ask them to reach back out to you once all the other calls have been done, just to see how they are feeling, and then send them their proposal after that. This allows you to get the last word in and be more memorable to the client. Build up trust and excitement on the call, get the commitment from them, and then send them the proposal.
Step 5: The Aftermath
If you really connected with the person and you’re excited about working with them, send them a quick text message or email to tell them! Victoria often sends them a quick text or email within 30 minutes of hanging up, just to let them know how much she enjoyed the call and actually includes what she enjoyed from the call. Even if it’s not a good fit, you can still do this! The person got on a call with you because you were a top contender in the choice to hire and that’s something to acknowledge. Maybe they aren’t a good fit, but maybe they have a friend who would be perfectly aligned to work with your brand. Don’t treat people like a transaction, treat them like humans. If you’re spending time with someone for 30 or 45 minutes, then you’re taking time to get to know them and their business, so take that extra few minutes to provide some sort of closure in the form of a quick follow up.
Lastly, always make sure you’re setting an expiration date on your proposals. This creates urgency without adding a ton of pressure, and it also protects your time and availability. It shows boundaries and a level of professionalism. It’s especially a good tone to set if you have deadlines within your own project that the expectation would be for them to meet within a certain number of days. Once you send the proposal, the ball is in their court, but you now have the opportunity to make intentional follow-ups for the set time period that you provided.
Follow Ups
These are a huge part of the sales team and while Victoria didn’t have time to get into this during the podcast episode, she has several podcast episodes with her sales coach, Gwen Tinsley, that goes over follow-ups. Feel free to check them out: Episode 109: The Psychology of Selling, Episode 132: 10 Myths You’ve Been Told About Selling That Are Hurting Your Business and Your Confidence, and Episode 150: Why Aren’t They Buying? How to Fix the Sales Slump.
Final Thoughts
It’s all about leadership. Your client wants to be led. They want you to make it clear, they want you to guide them, they want you to paint the picture of what’s possible and then walk them step by step towards saying yes. Sales isn’t about pressuring, it’s about clarity, and clarity comes from being prepared.
Key Quotes
“Sales really is not about pressuring at all. It's about clarity, and clarity comes from being prepared.”
Victoria Marcouillier
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