When I ask small business owners who their ideal clients are, there is one answer I get more than any other: people who understand the value of what I do and have the budget to pay for it.
I'm always tickled by this answer. Sure, you and everybody else!
But if that's your whole definition, you won't know what you're listening for when a prospect starts talking.
And that's the part that matters most when it comes to talking to prospects, whether it’s in a free discovery call or consultant, or a fit call.
The questions themselves are not the hard part, and most good calls ask the same five things (below).
What really separates a useful call from a wasted one is what you're listening for in their answers, and you can only listen for it if you know exactly who you are looking for.
The five basic questions
The exact questions you ask will be different from mine, and the more calls you do and the clearer you get on who your ideal client really is, the more dialed-in those questions become. But most intro calls should touch on the same basics:
why someone reached out
what challenges they're dealing with
a bit of background
what they've tried before
what they want to accomplish
The difference between your calls and mine is less about the questions, and more about knowing what you are listening for in their answers.
First, know who you're listening for
If your only prerequisite is someone who understands your value and has the budget, you're not being discerning about who you work with. You aren't concerned about how much value you can provide, or if they are the kind of client you can deliver your best work for. You just want to make a sale wherever and to whomever you can if they have the money and are willing to pay you.
The problem is, your prospects can feel it.
Instead, change your goal and perspective and the call will be more valuable for both of you (and it won’t have that icky sales feeling we are dread.)
What listening for fit sounds like
Here's how that worked at our agency.
Once I got clear on who was a great fit for us (and who wasn’t), the questions I asked got much more specific.
You see, we worked with 1-3 person service businesses, built websites exclusively on Squarespace, and delivered projects in 1-3 day Intensives.
So if someone told me their website was on WordPress, that was immediately a yellow flag that I needed to dig deeper into.
I’d ask how they got clients, how much traffic their site currently received each month, and what their experience was managing their website. I was looking for specifics about how well their website was working for them because I knew that I would only want to work with them if they were willing to, and if I thought they should, move to squarespace.
If their business ran on referrals and the site had very little traffic, they very well might still be a great fit. We had successfully moved many clients from WordPress to Squarespace, and those clients were so happy with the switch because their websites were much easier to manage.
But if they told me that most of their clients came from direct website traffic, that they had invested a lot in SEO and ranked high in organic search results, and had hundreds of blog posts driving leads, I would know immediately we were not the right partner, and this was not a good project for us. Because we don’t design on WordPress, I don’t have expertise in moving a website while maintaining strong exisitng search rankings, and I didn’t want to learn that, or bring in a partner.
And because I would never recommend a move that could jeopardize what was already working, I just immediately knew it wasn’t a good fit for us.
Could I take on a project like that and bring in a WordPress developer, or hire a company that specializes in moving URLs to maintain SEO? Absolutely. I've done those things many times in the past. But what I learned is that every time I went out of my wheelhouse, it took more time and energy than it was usually worth, unless I was going to repeatedly deliver that process to more clients
So just because you can take on a project outside your specialty doesn’t mean it’s a good idea! Every exception pulls you further from the process you know works.
Listen for readiness, not just the project
Take Amin Astaneh, founder of Certo Modo, a software reliability consultancy, as an example. Beyond understanding the technical situation, he listens for readiness. He pays attention to where the company is in its growth, the severity and frequency of incidents they have experienced, and whether there is genuine urgency behind the problem.
He also notices how executives talk about their engineers, because his work succeeds only in organizations where trust and empathy exist.
In other words, Amin is not just qualifying a project, he is also assessing whether the company is emotionally and structurally prepared to do the work required to get results. If and only if it is clear they are a perfect fit, does he move to the next part of the Fit Call and offer them his Lead Product.
A Fit Call, not a pitch
In order to run a successful Fit Call, we start with the premise that you are here to figure out if and how you can help someone, and only if you can will you suggest a way to work together.
The purpose of the call is not to pitch, but to determine whether they are genuinely a strong fit for what you deliver and the way you work.
It's fifteen minutes, and it's free. The deeper questions, the ones that take a couple of hours, belong to a paid first step. (I've written about why the name of the call matters, and the whole sequence is on the Lead Product Method page.)
but you can only do this if you are very clear on who is a perfect fit and who isn't. The more specific you are, the better!
Start here
Before your next call, write down three answers that would make you say "we're not the right fit," and the question that would surface each one. (Mine are in Client Red Flags.)
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