Two coaches explain how to stay sharp during free introductory calls and convert prospects into clients. They use a "rocks on the scale" metaphor: each statement signaling commitment moves the prospect closer to signing. The key shift is listening for emotional cues and treating prospects as if they're already your client, which changes the entire conversation.
Chapters
You are very engaged in that process. And I found that my experience. It's almost like I'm waiting for the second half of the call where we're actually going to talk about the coaching and whether they want to do it or not. That's where it gets interesting. And I'm almost a little bored during the first part, which is not good.
Right.
Because they're, like, telling me their dreams, and I'm like, yes, write that down.
Another dream.
And so I'm wondering what you focus on or how you see it that might help me drop in and be more engaged and obviously do better.
Yeah. So good question. Because, yeah, sometimes people really bore me, too. But usually it's not people I'm having an intro session with. So that's a really good question. I like the question because it's making me look in to see how I can be so engaged with some people and so unfortunately disengaged with other people sometimes. So. Well, I think, because I'm too busy while I'm listening. So I think when people are telling me, like, I went to Bloomingdale's with a friend of mine and I was looking at shirts they had, and the sales guy was like, happy to. I end up working with that particular guy a lot just because I don't know, for whatever reason. So he's like, oh, he's happy to see me, and he wants to tell me about all stuff going on in his life. And I just want to see if they have this in a large, you know, like. But my buddy who was there, he was like, you know, he was, like, letting him chat away with him. And afterwards we left and I was like, man, you have a much higher threshold for being able to just listen to people drone on about nothing. He's like, oh, my God, I love it. He's like, I love hearing. I didn't have to suffer through it. I was, like, enjoying it. And I was like, whoa, what? Like, you know, And I don't know if I'm ever going to get there. And I don't know if I aspire to either. But when I'm listening to that, I'm thinking, like, you know, can you get this in another size, whatever? And I just want to try on my clothes. And I have a different agenda. But when I'm here, my agenda is ultimately signing them up before, but really, ultimately helping them get results. That's the ultimate agenda. And so in order to help them get results, in order to help them get signed up, I have probably, like 1,000 filters going through my mind that's assessing everything they say I'm thinking. What does this mean in terms of the likelihood of them signing up? What does this mean in terms of things that we're going to need to help overcome in order to get results? What does this mean for something I might share late? I don't know. But my mind is just processing, so it might look like I'm just nice and actively listening, which I am. But in a lot of those thoughts aren't even conscious. It's just all happening. I'm not necessarily thinking the thoughts. It's just going through all these filters into some sort of thing so that, you know, I'll take some notes and then I'll share some stuff back. So I think that's fun. Listening to somebody, you know, talk about something else when I want to, you know, that's not so fun. This is fun. I love coaching also. Coaching goes deep. So I'm also looking for, like, how is she responding emotionally to everything, you know, is she is the picture of what she wants big enough, bright enough, exciting enough? And there was a part of her that was where she was loudly like, well, that wouldn't change my life that much. Where I was like, ooh, that's kind of a sign that she might not sign up. Because as much as she wants it, she might not want it bad enough. She might not want it, she might not think it really matters whether she actually achieves all this or not. And so then I asked, well, you know, how could things actually be much different if you get all this? Because I wanted to, like, try to pull some more stuff out. And at some point, we got the wow, awesome breath, you know, so that's kind of why I don't feel bored at the beginning. All that is all stuff. Everything that you pull out at the beginning, everything in there is like putting rocks on the scale towards signing up and hiring you. And the more they share, the more rocks there are. Now, there was a moment where Michelle started telling me about the book she was writing and what was going to be in there that wasn't going to add more rocks. That was just going to go off in some other direction. And probably, I mean, now if I asked her about, like, what it would feel like to have the book and how exciting it's going to be to have the book and why you want the book, like, that could have helped add more rocks, and maybe I could have gone there a little bit deeper. But I also wanted to see what else overall, big picture at that time so that's kind of what's going on in my mind.
Yeah, there's a lot in there. So paying attention to how much they're associating and feeling. Those sound like the rocks is the feeling. And also, what's really interesting, which I didn't realize until now, is it's almost like I'm getting this information, and then I'm going to. And then we're going to decide if they're going to be my client or not. But if I approach it like they are my client, then I'm going to be listening in a very different way. Versus, like, well, I'm not sure if this is going to be useful or not.
If you presuppose they're already your client, that's a really good idea. I like that.
