The Pre-Call System Dog Trainers Skip (And Why It Costs Clients)

I'm just going to go through one other concept that I find myself talking about a lot on your one-to-ones, and that is pre-call nurture. So our warmest of warm leads, right, bar those that are actually on the phone and in the follow-up sequence, our warmest of warm leads are those that have booked calls. So we should deploy efforts in making sure that we're putting our best foot forward and increasing our chance of success Of turning that prospect into a paid client. And I see you guys and girls neglecting your warm leads because I'll, I'll ask you the question, what do you do in between them booking the call and then actually conducting that call, whether it's 3, 4, or 5 days? And a lot of you are saying like nothing. So obviously someone's going to book in, and again, we want to be putting consistently our best foot forward in making sure the chances of them turning into a paid client are as high as they possibly can be. So we're going to just go through best practices. As soon as the call comes through, I think good practice is to go and send them a video via iPhone, right, of you, a selfie video. So we do this in the mentorship. So Maggie will be like, oh, I've got a call with Sean, um, 3:30 his time on Monday. So I'll literally get my phone up. Hey Sean, Maggie's just told me you've booked a call with her, 3:30 your time. on Monday. She's super excited to speak to you. Just a couple of things, Sean. One, make sure you show up to the call because, like, Maggie's got shit to do. She doesn't want to be relentlessly following up with you. Like, no one, no one enjoys doing that. 2, I've included a document giving you all the information you need regarding the mentorship. It goes through price, like, how long it takes, what's included. I've done this so you can just have a constructive conversation. Like, ultimately, Maggie's gonna pitch you on our services, but we want you to go in there making the most educated decision possible whether or not you want to go forward. By the way, we're actually at our mentorship weekend, so, you know, hopefully in the future we'll see you here at the YCA at some point. But other than that, any questions, just give us a shout, mate. So then I'd get Maggie to like ping that over with a pre-call document as well, which we're going to come on to. And I think you could do that with every single client. It's going to take Just a couple of seconds. Show that you're a real person. Show that you give a fuck. Again, like open up a dialogue. Send it via iPhone if you've got an iPhone, not WhatsApp or anything like that. And basically, you can start in like an indoctrination process pre-call. Does that all make sense so far? Just like quick, quick shout out for you guys. It's going to be more like, "Hey, just seen you book a call for Fido." Funnily enough, you know, I've got a reactive German Shepherd, or I'm just walking a German Shepherd now. Blahdy blahdy blah, like things like that you can implement. Just like break that fourth wall. When you text them and say, hey Sean, it's Maggie from YCA, super excited to speak to you later or this week. Jacob's just put a video or I've just put a video together for you and here's the document mentioned as well. If they no-show you or you need to follow up with them and you ring them, it'll say maybe Maggie on the phone when you ring them on the iPhone, which just gets them way more likely to actually answer the phone. Whereas if you sent it via Android or whatever, you just don't have that level of luxury. So, selfie video. You do disclose the price here, like in that text you mentioned? So, that's a good question. whether to disclose price or not. If you've got an abundance of leads and you're seeing a lot of tyre kickers come through, people just looking for free advice, people that don't have any investment, and it's filling up your calendar, we typically add in more friction to better qualify the leads. So we may disclose the price if we're getting a lot of shit through. Like, I don't want Maggie on like back-to-back sales calls really. She's got shit to do here. I don't really want to expand the closer team either. So we're just like, yeah. We give a starts from price, we give like the momentum price as a, as a on its own. But again, in our webinars, we disclose price for the most part. And so just to make sure Maggie's not got like 50 calls to make per week, she's then neglecting her day-to-day duties here as operations manager, and then ends up like, same for you guys, you're all business owners, if you're doing calls yourself, you know, closing 1 in every 5 isn't gonna just kill your fucking morale, but you're like, I can't believe I'm speaking to this many fucking idiots, you know what I mean? Yeah. It really does depend. If calls are short and I'm just starting out, I'm not disclosing really anything, and I'm just filling my calendar and having those conversations, right? So it really does depend. So, uh, Adam and Brody, for example, they want to add probably quite a lot of friction given they're very busy. They've got good call volume coming through. Same in regards to Jay yesterday. Um, he's got calls for the next fucking 3 months or whatever, so he's gonna have to start adding in friction points to make sure only the most qualified people squeeze through his funnel. You see what I mean? So it does depend. You've got 2 options there. You can disclose like full package price. Again, if I just had an abundance, everything's full up and I'm just speaking to like dead lead after dead lead after dead lead, I'm just going to go, here's my package price. I'm basically just going to say like, if you can't afford it, don't fucking show up to your call, right? And again, comes back to being ruthless. So some practices we can implement here is like disclose full price if we've got an abundance of opportunity and we need to squeeze the calendar. We could do a starts from price, kind of like what I mentioned there. The thing is, right, you have to remember people are being promised they can have their shit fixed in like a session or 2. Like, people are selling fucking snake oil left, right, and centre. And I know that's not the case for anyone in this room, otherwise you wouldn't be in this room. And so we've got to put our best foot forward. If we just go ahead and be like, yeah, it's £1,500. It's $2,000. They're gonna be like, well, fuck that. Why, why the hell would I go with you when this guy's gonna come around, throw a set of keys at my dog's head, and then like everything's gonna be fine, right? So, um, sometimes like disclosing full price isn't putting our best foot forward because if like we haven't had opportunity to rationalise why we're that price. Does that make sense? Right. And you can immediately just like put a bunch of people off. So we want to get them on the call so we can like break things down and go through our call best practices as we've talked about the last couple of days. However, what I would suggest or could suggest is like a starts from price. So yeah, my packages start from this amount of money, and then your starts from price needs to be around the amount of like your payment plan prices are, right? So let's say I've got a £1,000 product and I offer a PayPal split into 3, £330. I might just say like, yeah, my programmes start from £400. Right? And if they get on the phone and go, yeah, I want to do the £400 thing, you've got a couple of options. You can either say, all right, to be fair, like, you don't need the full mash-ins, we can do a downsell. On a downsell, you make sure your hourly rate is higher than, like, your package hourly rate. Or you could just say, if, if this is the case, like, this is a bigger problem than, like, just a couple of sessions, I'm afraid. I would— it would— I would abuse my duty of care as a dog trainer to to try and fix this in such a short amount of time because it's not going to work and we'll probably end up making the issue worse. All right, so I don't, I don't, you know, I, I'm only going to recommend what I think is going to bring a full solution. As I said, we're trying to, you know, we're— I'm selling you the result here, the end goal, as opposed to like the inclusives of the package. And my recommendation would be this, like, you want to go somewhere else, they're going to try and like square peg round hole you, dog, you know, that's up to you, but that's not what I'd recommend. That's whether to disclose price or not, and you typically find yourself in like that mid-range. So along with that selfie video, we got a couple of options we can send. I think on our dog training side, we would send like an FAQ, which are questions about our business, which is essentially like propaganda on our business, right? So how long have you been in business? About 5 years I've done this. How many dogs have you trained? Fucking loads. Like, what happens if it doesn't work? I'll give you your money back. You know, so we reframe essentially like propaganda about our business. It seems like a very aggressive word, but propaganda about our business into questions. You know what I mean? Like, where are you based? Oh, we have a 5K, a 5-acre facility in Leeds. Like, here's a bunch of pictures. You know what I mean? What dogs do you have? You know, if you've aimed in your messaging for a certain niche, And you in that in that FAQs, you know, you ask the question: What dogs do you have? Well, I've got three Kelpies. You know, I've got three Kelpies: blue, red, and pink, or whatever, right? And they're a Kelpie owner, and they're going like, "You shouldn't have sat front row, Sean." So yeah, so you have a little think of like how we could reframe the things we want our prospect to know about us and our business, but into questions. So in that selfie video, I could be like, just below, I've, I've, I've put an FAQ sheet of all the most questions I get asked at this point. So I thought I'd just ping them over now. So again, you know everything you need to know before we get to speak to each other. What else could we implement into this time period to set ourselves up for success? Some long-form content. Yeah. Hey, and I don't mean you go and you need to have a fucking YouTube playlist and, and have 100 videos on YouTube to send them to. But some educational content. But however, you know what I'd say here is like that long-form content needs to tackle some sort of objection. So examples, we could do a full tool breakdown, like why we use tools, etc., etc. Price, you could include maybe a testimonial from someone else that is like, I spent like 15 grand on dog training before I found Sean. And yeah, you know, I, you know, I wasn't too sure, like To be fair, the price of the program, it did slim my wallet a little bit, but if I'd just gone there for the first time, I would've saved so much money. You know what I mean? If they're lazy, we could maybe introduce a piece of content where we talk about why we don't do just single sessions, like why we don't do a hit-and-run job and why it's super important, like, we have more of a holistic approach to training this dog to mitigate behavioral fallout and shit like that. You know what I mean? Coming on to price, guys. Seldom is it the price, right? Seldom is it true, I do not have access to the money. They either don't believe that you can bring the final result, they don't trust you in one way, shape, or form. Sometimes they don't believe in themselves that they can do it. Sometimes they can afford it, but like I just said, they can't afford the price and the energy it's going to take as well, right? So we can like play around with things Uh, here, you know, a lot of you are charging anywhere around the £500 to £1,000 mark. Some of you are in affluent areas as well. So don't get hell-bent on it being the price. I think that's a false belief. And you constantly just saying it's too expensive, it's too expensive, I'm too expensive, I'm too expensive, is gonna stop you from improving this process. And you're going to look for the easy option by reducing your prices, which ends up being a race to the bottom, right? So like, again, this is for us to take accountability and improve our, um, and improve our efforts, put our best foot forward in terms of like converting people. And they're like, don't give them the accountability. They're like, oh, they can't afford it, they can't afford it. They probably can. They just like don't trust you enough for whatever reason. So if we take the accountability, we can start doing shit about it, right? What else could we implement in this time? Yeah, perfect. What would make for a great case study in this situation? Same breed. Same breed. And what else? Same breed and/or? Same problem. Same problem, yeah, same issue. There's probably another one here we could implement. Same breed, same problem. Same owner? Yeah, same circumstance, same owner. Nice one. You can have a hat for that one, that was great. You already got a hat? No, no, no. All right. Same owner slash like circumstance, right? So you might get an objection that people like, they work full-time or whatever, or you know, they've got a bunch of kids or something. Something, whatever it is, you know, we could we could implement a case study video. So tell us who you are, ask the situation, blah blah blah. Yeah, you know, I work full time. I've got three kids. Dogs a nightmare. Didn't think I was going to have enough time to actually do this, but didn't actually cost me a lot of time at all. So those three things super important: same breed, same issue, same circumstance. The more relatable it is, the more accurate it is to the people we're lining up. Hence why I'm going to always encourage you guys to niche down because if let's say you're just working with Kelpies, for example. All our testimonials are going to be very highly relevant to the next people that come through, right? So they can see ten testimonials of Kelpies, and this you're going to hit the nail like bullseye, bullseye, bullseye, bullseye, bullseye. Whereas like again, if you're like us, we kind of get away with it a little bit because we've we've got a bigger team. But we've got a lot of German Shepherd, sausage dog, and fucking Malinois case studies, right? So that makes it easier. But you know when we get the Nova Scotian Duck Tolling Retriever. Well, we've actually got one of them, to be fair, but maybe that's a bad example. Um, but you know, these fucking wacky breeds or whatever, Dalmatian or whatever it is, we might not have the relevant case study. But if you're niching down, you should have a bank of the same breed and very similar problems, right? So again, exponentially increases the likelihood of conversion when you're speaking like very accurately and relatable within all these steps. You know what I mean? That makes sense. Kind of rambled a bit there, I apologize. Uh, anything else? Would you send guides at this point? Yeah, so we send a bait guide. So, um, an hour before the call, hopefully if my trainers are implementing their best practices, uh, we send a, hey, we've got like a bit of a reactivity blueprint that I think would help us like get the most out of our call. We send this an hour before the call. Do you want me to send it over? We leave it open like that because when they reply and say yeah, they're more likely to show up to the call, you know. So it could be anything. It's just like, hey, here's this free thing that will, uh, really like help us get the most out of our conversation. Like, it's educational, right? If they like reply and say yeah just an hour before the call, you know, it's really unlikely, um, that they're gonna fucking no-show you, you know what I mean? What other things might we add here? Testimonials. More testimonials. I guess that'll come under case studies, but yeah, fuck it. Again, make sure everything is based off common objections, right? So if people are coming up time and time again with tool objections, you maybe send them over a podcast. You could send that post-call as well. But yeah, we could implement podcasts. Things we spoke about yesterday in terms of building like, know, and trust. Origin story, big one. Worth creating a long-form asset on your origin story, just like 6 to 8 minutes talking about you, how you got into things, your story. Same best practices in terms of indoctrination yesterday, relatability, authority, positioning, which is authority, proof of course. Like all of those concepts that we spoke about yesterday need to be ticked off because of now we've got this person's contact details, now they've made a micro-commitment in terms of signing up to a call, they're more likely to consume this sort of content. And so we want to propagate them in that period with all of this sort of stuff, right? So they do genuinely, and I mean this in a sincere way, go into that call as educated as they possibly can to make a good decision, you know, for them. I really hope none of you are trying to sell people into things that you can't genuinely help. So this just allows for, to have a really constructive conversation, like whether it be through the mentorship or our Dog training, like essentially the more people watch our shit, right? And they say like, oh yeah, I've listened to all your podcasts and I've like watched all your YouTube, blah blah blah. The the sale becomes way more easier in person. It's just like, oh yeah, I just watched an ad and like a webinar yesterday. You know what I mean? So we can set ourselves up, like artificially create that process by by doing some hard yards in that. In that time frame between call booked and call attended, could just send them like fucking a blog or you know just a written email tackling any one of these objections, right? And by the way, day of call text like reminder, like the morning of call. So hey Claire, can't wait to chat to you later and help you out with so and so. Here's a a testimonial that sounds fucking similar to your dog, you know what I mean? And then the, the bait text an hour before, all on iPhone. You know, you've got their number. A lot of people— happens to us quite a lot— they'll book a consult call via Calendly and then Google me, and then they'll still presume like we were going to ring them 5 past 1 whenever their call was. You know, you get a text from them like, you ringing me, right? So again, just make sure you have their their phone number on standby. If they no-show you, just ring them. And then if you've already texted them, it'll say maybe from Hugh Hefner or whatever, and, um, then they're more likely to answer the phone, you know what I mean? And just a very quick word of warning: when your calendar starts to fill and you have decent volume of leads, you'll start neglecting this process because you'll take your leads for, for granted. Don't fucking do that, because then you fall into the trap of high-volume, poor-quality leads. And that's how you get stuck in the rat race. Jay made a— I think it was Jay yesterday— made a very good point on no-shows. Reaches out to warmest leads to bring them forward. Yeah, which I think is such a great point and really good practice. If you get no-showed and you've got that hour spare for whatever reason, you should have a list somewhere of your leads coming through and, and like send them a text or whatever. I've got some time now and bring them forward in the process, you know what I mean? The quicker you get back to someone, like, it's directly proportionate to how likely you are to close that sale. All right, anything else on that? Implement that, uh, that can make a significant difference on one, show rate, if any of you have any show rate issues, but those that do show will be more qualified, and ultimately your close rate as well.