EP 359 - Why Your Consultation Calls Don't Convert in 2026 (I Did 800)

MarketingCoaching Lifestyle
Written By Debbie Shadid
 

In the first 18 months of my business, I had 800 consultation calls. I made just about every mistake you can make, the pushy script, the two-hour calls, the price I didn't believe in. In this video, I'll show you what I learned so your calls can convert without any of that.

If you're new to my channel, my name is Debbie Shadid. I'm a Business Growth and Life Coach and the founder of the Business Building Boutique. For over two decades, I've helped women learn how to become coaches, get clients, grow their businesses, and create meaningful income doing work they love.

When you stop performing a script and start having a comfortable, honest conversation, selling your coaching stops feeling pushy, and the right people say yes a whole lot more often.

In this episode, we'll walk through:

  • Why a sales script can quietly disconnect you from the very person you're trying to help

  • What "having a comfortable conversation" actually looks like, and why it converts better than any script

  • How talking too much, instead of listening, turns a sales call into a free coaching session

  • Why a confusing or ten-minute offer loses the sale, and how to make yours clear in a sentence

  • How the wrong price, too high or too low, pushes you into convincing energy that repels people

  • Why you don't owe everyone an offer, even after they've shown up for a call

  • The simple call-to-action shift that sets up the entire conversation to go your way

Imagine getting on a consultation call calm and curious instead of bracing to convince anyone of anything. When you lead with a real conversation, listen more than you talk, and only invite the right people in, selling becomes the most natural part of your business. That's how your calls start turning into clients.

If you're ready to have consultation calls that actually convert, let's talk. Book your free Blueprint Call and we'll look at your business together, including the exact way to have a comfortable conversation that leads to a yes: https://debbieshadid.com/schedule

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If this helped, share it with a coach whose calls aren't converting yet. Subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss the next episode, where I walk through the mindset work that sets you up before you ever get on the call.

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Transcript

800 consultation calls. Would you do it? That's what I did in the first 18 months of my business. I had 800 consultation calls. In this episode, I'm gonna talk to you about what I did right, what I did wrong. It did create 80 clients, but I will tell you, it took a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of sleepless nights. I am Debbie Shadid. I am so glad you're here. I help women over 50 build beautiful boutique-style coaching businesses without paid ads. Make sure you subscribe and stay connected so you can keep up with what you need to do to grow your own profitable coaching business. So, 800 consultation calls. Yeah, that's a lot. 800 calls. Do you know how long that took me? One consultation call should probably be between 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour tops. Sometimes I spent two hours on that. 800 calls almost two hours long, imagine how much time that took. A lot of people that I talk to today, when they have one call or two calls and somebody doesn't say yes, they're saying to me, like, " What did I do wrong? My business doesn't work. Maybe I should change my niche." No, I did not change my niche. All I did was try to get better. Every single call, I would think, " What did I do wrong?" And you know what else I did? I would watch the call back. Imagine the time that I spent. So I wanna talk to you about everything that worked and what didn't work. First of all, I had been in sales my whole life, my whole career. In fact, I was in sales starting in high school when I sold Amway. I have to tell you, I credit Amway for the success that I've had in my business, because they taught me how to sell. They taught me about the power of positive thinking. They introduced me to all the big greats like Bob Proctor, and about how your thinking could help you create better results. So my whole career up until the moment that I'm talking about with these 800 consultation calls, I had been wildly successful in selling just anything. Anybody that I worked for, I was a top performer. So when I came fully online, I watched somebody on YouTube who told me, " Hey, online selling is different, and you should hire me as your coach to help you learn how to sell, because you have to use a script." So you know what I did? I bought into their idea. I didn't need help with selling. I was already good at selling, but I bought into their idea, and that's where it all began. So this particular coach that I hired was telling me, " You must use a script, and you have to have the conversation kind of flow this way, and you must ask these questions. And essentially, you need to get somebody to beg you to work with you." That's really the kind of the bottom line, is get somebody to ask. And right away, I was like, " Ugh, this does not feel good." All of my entire career, I sold everything I sold because I had great relationships. I met people, I got to know about them, I cared about them, and I really just trusted that it was all gonna work out. When I started this business in 2000, I decided, you know what? I'm just gonna be the light. Everybody that I interact with, I'm gonna be the light. I'm gonna show up as light, and for me, that was like spreading God's love, right? Even though I wasn't saying anything to him about it, I just wanted to come in and be a beautiful, glowing presence to him, and I just trusted that whatever I said, it was going to work out. One of the things I've always said to myself is, "Everything always works out for me." So all those years while I was doing this business in person, that's the way I sold. And then as I mentioned, I got online and I thought I had to hire somebody to help me sell. I did not need any help. So I started on this script, and the script conversation was just uncomfortable, honestly. And it kept me disconnected from people. So while there's this relationship sort of sales success that I'd had, now all of a sudden I'm following a script, and truthfully, I was so busy talking that I wasn't even listening to them. Can you imagine? It sounds so ridiculous now, but I know that people are doing this today and that's why I want to talk to you about it. I want you to have some awareness about what it looks like to actually sell. There are many great sales coaches out there, but I don't think you need one. I think you can start out by having what I call a comfortable conversation. Now first let me back up and break down for you what I really did because while it sounds awful, 800 consultations. The truth is I sold 80 clients out of it and that's a 10% conversion. And honestly, I wish I would've known at that time 10% was pretty good. I was talking to people all around the world. Like, they did not know me. they might have been in Nigeria and here's Debbie in Oklahoma talking to them. And so selling 80 people out of 800 honestly was pretty darn good. At the time I was selling my coaching for $3,000. That was $240,000 worth of revenue. Look, a lot of coaches, they've never made that before. So in one way it was actually really good. I today probably sell 70% or more of everybody that I talk to, but I've been at this for years, right? I've learned how to do it in a way that really works for me. When I started my business in 2000 and I was working in person, I actually called on 196 businesses. We had the Yellow Pages. remember that? Yellow Pages, and I went door to door, and it said, "No soliciting," and I opened up the door anyway, and I walked in, and I sold them something. But I had to talk to 196 people before one person said yes. It basically was the same way with these 800 consultation calls online. Are you that committed to building a business? If you're that committed, you know what you do? You make millions, and I've sold over $10 million worth of, you know, coaching, consulting. Would you do that? Most people won't. So let me tell you about where I really went wrong, and this is the honest truth. First of all, that script was a bad idea. it felt pushy. It felt like I was manipulating things. You know that convincing energy that you feel? If you feel that way, something is off. listen to your intuition. Now, there's a difference between your intuition and what your gut is telling you, and nervousness. So you gotta decide which one is it. Is it just nerves? am I just uncomfortable because I'm doing something new, or is there something that's really off? I just ignored it. I knew something was off. So I had the consultation calls. They should have been 45 minutes, and you know how long they were? A lot of them were two hours, and then even worse, I would listen to the whole call back, and I would take notes to see, how could I improve? What could I do better? Those calls were so long because I was so busy talking. I actually wasn't even following hardly the script that they gave me. I was trying to prove my value. I was worth it, and yet I was trying to prove to them that they needed to hire me, and I was doing that to compensate for the fact that I felt so bad about the way that I was selling them. So I was basically giving them a coaching session right there. They didn't even need to hire me. I was telling them everything to do in their business. Why pay $3,000 to work with me? So yeah, I coached people on the call. I tried to prove myself. I wasn't even doing what felt right to me. In most cases, I didn't know what they wanted to do. Sure, I asked the questions, but I wasn't listening. You should be listening more than you're talking. You should let them tell you the story of their coaching. And then when I would go to present my offer, because I was presenting it the way that they told me to, those people that I hired, my offer was so confusing it would take me 10 minutes to try to tell it. Nobody has the bandwidth, especially today, to listen to 10 minutes of anything about an offer because they're confused. and you know what they say, if you confuse, you lose, right? If you confuse people, they're not gonna buy. they're not clear about how you can help them and why you're the one to help them, they're not gonna buy. I also offered my coaching at the wrong price. Hear me on this I was overcharging initially. Remember how I sold $3,000 coaching? Initially, they wanted me to sell it for 5,000. And again, they were telling me what to sell it at, and I was like, "I don't like that." And they were like, "You should be a high-ticket coach. you're already very successful." And I was. All that was true. I had helped businesses make millions already, so I was successful, but this was all uncharted territory. I was talking to people that I had never talked to before. It was completely different. So I didn't love my price, and I went with what they said, and that is where the convincing comes in. I had to keep trying to justify the price. And also, in the middle of the call, I was like, "Well, yeah, but I'll give it to you for half price." Nobody wants to buy from somebody like that either. So you're either undercharging because you're desperate, or you're overcharging because you think that's what you should, I'm doing the air quotes, you should charge at that. and in between all that, you're wheeling and dealing and making offers. You are letting whatever somebody else is saying control the price. This is another big mistake that so many coaches are making. You're listening to everybody talk about their circumstances, what's going on in their life, and you're deciding on your price based on that. So yeah, I was desperate. I really was. I was convincing people. It wasn't inviting. I essentially was like, "Please, let's work together. I really wanna work together." Now, today I say that. I'm like, "Look, I wanna work with you. I know I can help you." That comes from a different place. When I say that today, it is out of love, and it's out of like, "I can help you." It's a different energy. Then I was like, "Look, please, let's work together. You're the perfect person." It had a whole different tone to it. So I was misaligned with the call to action even. My call to action on my website said, "Come have a breakthrough session or discovery call." I was like, "This is BS. I'm having a sales call. There's no breakthrough or discovery about any of this." So even in my head, I was like, "Oh, they came to the call for a breakthrough or discovery. I need to help them have the breakthrough." That's why I was coaching them. Like, today I'm like,"No, I have a business assessment call. I'm gonna look at your business. I'm gonna tell you what's wrong," and Then I'm gonna offer to help you if I think you're an ideal client. This is another interesting piece that I want you to hear. I was making offers to people that I didn't even wanna work with. Yeah, people that I knew were gonna be a problem to work with, I was making offers. You do not have to make an offer to somebody that you don't wanna work with. Just because they had a consultation call with you doesn't mean that they are the right person for you. So I really wanna make sure that your call to action is right. I wanna make sure your price is right, that you feel comfortable in the questions that you're asking, that you are bringing the right people to the call. That's through the marketing. That all happens before. That's a whole another conversation. Your marketing message needs to bring in the right people. And then how long the calls are. As I talked about, two hours? That's ridiculous. Figure out what time you actually need, and I need about an hour. Today, I do, but that's because I spend about 20 to 30 minutes on niching. Every person that gets on a call with me, we basically have a niche session first because I want to make sure that I have diagnosed their niche problem and that I know that I can help them. So I essentially have a private call first before the consultation. That's why it takes me about an hour, and I do not wait for people to ask me, "Hey, what is it like to work with you?" I tell them. As soon as I figure out if their niche is right and I get a sense for this person, are they really gonna do what it takes? Are they really committed? I'm like, all right, this person can make money. And that's usually what I say. I'm like, "Okay, I'm telling you what, you got a business idea. You can make money." Then I make the offer, Then I just say, "Look, I wanna work with you. How can we make this work?" I go through the pricing right then. I answer any questions. I say, tell me what's coming up for you." So the conversation is really a natural conversation. So what I wanna encourage you to do is just think through what it's gonna look like for you to have your consultation call, and before the call, I want you to get your head on straight. So I'm gonna have a whole nother episode about the self-coaching that you do before you get on the call. But for today, I'm gonna leave you with everything I just shared. 800 consultation calls. I've talked about the main lessons. Go in there and have a comfortable conversation. Find out what brought them to the call. Find out what their problem is. What have they already tried? You share how you are the solution. Make sure you know what they really want, and then make the offer. And then help them understand the value of what it is that you offer, answer all their questions. And it's so much easier than having this scripted conversation. All right? so check on all those things we talked about in this episode, and then check back with me. Make sure you subscribe because I'm gonna talk again about the mindset of how you get your head on straight before you have the consultation call. If you are working on building your business and you are like, "Yes, I need to have consultation calls," and you're not having any, let's have a conversation about how I can help you. Inside the Business Building Boutique, we cover everything, including the exact framework for having this comfortable conversation. Schedule a call with me. The link is in the comments, debbieshadid.com/schedule. I will walk you through in a comfortable way what it would look like for me to support you in your business, and we'll have that niche conversation as well. All right? Have a beautiful day, and I will see you on the next episode.

Debbie Shadid https://www.DebbieShadid.com
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EP 358 - Can't Find Coaching Clients? This Is the Fastest Way in 2026