Free Strategy Sessions Don’t Work (and What to Do Instead)

Do Free Strategy Sessions really work?

Setting meetings with prospective clients may be one of the most important things you can do for your business. That’s why it’s crucial to properly frame these calls to ensure they’re near-guaranteed success.

But failure to properly frame the initial meeting for both you – and your prospect can lead to giving away your time… a frustrating and fruitless endeavor.

Free Strategy Sessions

If you’re currently giving away free strategy sessions in an attempt to generate leads and sign more clients, I want to share a new perspective to make these sessions more impactful.

First, understand your prospect and you have distinct agendas. They want something, you want something. Those mutual desires lead to an exchange of goods and services. However, problems occur when you both have completely different agendas – they're hoping to get some free consulting or coaching and you're hoping to get a new client!

How to Make Free Strategy Sessions Work

The only way for these “strategy sessions” to work effectively is if you take the lead.

You set the boundaries, you establish yourself as the authority and you structure the session in a way that leads to the outcome that’s mutually beneficial. Sadly, that’s not what most of us do for initial consultations. We allow ourselves to go on auto-pilot, and often allow the prospective client to drive the call in circles, never arriving at the intended destination.

So often, we think of an initial appointment as an end goal when we should actually think of it as an element or step in the conversion phase of our sales funnel.

How Not to Do Free Strategy Sessions

Let’s take a look at what business owners often fall into...

1. Schedule a forty-five minute session and within the first five minutes, it’s obvious this client is not a fit for your services… but you keep pressing on...
2. Or, you find people back out at the last minute because they’re skeptical the session is nothing more than a veiled sales pitch.
3. Or, perhaps you’re finding these prospective clients to be a great fit, but then they fall off the radar after your extensive call with them… what gives!?

If they do show up for the call, they typically begin to tell you their problems and a huge backstory (that you honestly don’t need to hear) and you quickly realize that they’re not the ideal client for you but feel obligated to provide the full session because that was what you initially “promised”.

Have you ever noticed how spending time with a prospect who isn’t a good fit drains your energy, time and resources? Most of us can see that and yet you may still find yourself in a revolving door of incorrect positioning and long-winded conversations.

Sound familiar?

The Purpose of the Free Strategy Session

Let’s be honest – you’re in this to help people AND to make money. You move people forward, solve their problems and generate momentum in their lives. Your skills are invaluable and extremely lucrative for both you and them.

But if you keep finding yourself speaking with the wrong people or having “strategy sessions” with people who thank you but don’t pay you, then you’ve clearly got a problem in your sales process.

What to Do Instead of a Free Strategy Session

We teach our clients a tool called The Quick Audit which saves them hours in lost time and revenue.

It's the perfect tool to establish your authority, position yourself as an expert and get straight down to business, assessing whether the person you're speaking with is looking for a friend and free brain picking – or they’re serious about working with you.

The Quick Audit forces you to shift your mindset. Skilled experts don't give their time away because they know it's their most valuable asset.

If you’re tired of wasting energy on counterproductive prospect meetings, The Quick Audit is the answer.

You take the lead with the Quick Audit and quickly find out if the prospect has a problem you can help them with, the impact of that problem and the prospect’s urgency to solve that problem. And when you can articulate the prospect’s problem back to them with crystal clear clarity and confidence, they will naturally see you as the solution and expert to help them!