I do 45 minute calls with prospects and they mostly turn into me diagnosing their problem out loud. About one in six turns into work. The other five say they'll think about it and I sometimes later see they've done exactly what I described, in house or with someone cheaper. I don't want to be cagey and useless on a call, but I also can't keep doing five free audits a month. Where's the line?
Charge for the audit. A paid two hour audit with a written summary at maybe a quarter of a project fee filters out everyone who was shopping, pays you for the work you were doing anyway, and converts far better than a free call because they've already bought something from you once.
Cut the call to 20 minutes and make it qualification rather than diagnosis. Budget range, timeline, who decides, what they've already tried. If those four answers look good, then you book a longer paid session. One in six converting from a 45 minute unpaid diagnosis is roughly four hours a month of free work plus the emotional cost of being ghosted.
Asking budget on the first call felt rude to me for years and it was the single biggest improvement when I started. Phrase it as 'do you have a range in mind so I can tell you now whether I'm the right fit' and nobody has ever been offended.
Slight pushback on the general advice: in my niche the free call is genuinely how trust gets built and I close about a third. Might be worth checking whether one in six is bad for your field or whether the real problem is that you're getting the wrong five people on the call in the first place.
Then a short qualifying form before the booking link will do more than changing how you behave on the call.
That's fair. Most of them come from a directory listing where I have no control over who books, so the filtering happens on the call by default.
@pivot_pete · 7mo ago · 3 replies
The line is what versus how. Tell them exactly what's wrong and why it matters, in as much detail as you like, and stop before the implementation plan. 'Your product pages are being outranked because there's no internal linking from the category level, that's the main constraint' is a diagnosis that makes you look sharp. 'Here's the linking structure and the anchor text pattern' is the work. Most people can't act on the first without buying the second, and the ones who can were never going to hire you.
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@tessa_ondrak · 7mo ago
The fun part being the part you give away for free is a very common freelance failure mode. Worth watching for it in proposals too.
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@wren_oyelaran · 7mo ago
I've been giving away the second one every time because it's the fun part to talk about. That's a clean line to hold.
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