The call went well. That’s the confusing part.
The prospect had the problem and described it in nearly the words you use on your own site. You didn’t oversell, didn’t fumble the price, didn’t say anything you’d take back.
Then four days later: “This was great, let’s revisit in Q1.”
And they mean it. They’ll carry that problem into Q1 and probably straight through it.
If that’s been your month, the call wasn’t the issue. They were missing something that has nothing to do with you.
One of my coaching clients hit a run of this in January and came into a session pretty annoyed about it. (Annoyed is probably generous phrasing. There were expletives used.)
Two of his last three calls, right people, right problem, no reason to fix it that month.
How many agencies would KILL to get the right people who NEED their services booking on their calendar without having to blackmail or bribe?
But just because they book the call doesn’t mean they’re ready NOW.
(I’m using caps lock a lot, I know.)
The problem you solve is a condition, and conditions just sit there.
A company can limp along with bad marketing for six years and call every one of those years a slow patch. Nothing forces the issue. Nobody gets fired for tolerating it. It’s uncomfortable the way a bad mattress is uncomfortable, which is to say permanently, and never on any particular Tuesday.
What you need is a trigger.
A trigger is an event, and it has a date on it.
Their marketing person quit. They lost an account they thought was locked. A new VP started and wants a plan by Friday. They got beaten in a pitch by a competitor they’d never heard of.
Think about a plumber for a second. The pipes were bad for years, and the call comes the morning water starts coming through the ceiling.
Everybody with old pipes is your audience. Only the wet ceilings are buying this week.
Most agency marketing is written for the pipes.
It’s accurate. It’s usually well written. It describes the problem sitting perfectly still, and it lands in front of people who have felt that way for three years and will feel that way for three more.
You can see it in who books. Fit is good, urgency is missing, the call turns into a free education session, and the deal turns into “let’s revisit in Q1.”
To fix this, start collecting the events.
One question, on every call: what got you to book the call now?
“Now” is the keyword. Most people answer the first half and skip the second, so you’ll have to ask again in a different shape. Worth it.
Then write the answers down. All of them, for a couple of months, in whatever file you’ll actually open again.
Most owners use the answer to qualify the call they’re already sitting on and then throw it away. That’s the small version.
The bigger version is the pattern. Take the deals you won and find what happened in the two or three weeks before those people reached out.
They cluster and usually not on the events you would have guessed.
Once you can name them, your marketing has something to aim at besides the condition.
Say you sell to home services companies, and the trigger you keep hearing is “our office manager quit, and she was the one handling all our Google stuff.”
That’s a post. That’s a subject line. That’s a week somebody is having right now, and they’ll recognize it in your first sentence.
The condition version of that same post is “why home services companies struggle with local SEO.” Correct, useful, and read by nobody who is currently on fire.
The top of this piece was the trigger version, for what it’s worth.
Two honest caveats.
This needs volume. If you’ve had four sales calls this year, you don’t have a pattern, you have four data points and a hunch. Go get more calls first.
And a trigger doesn’t override fit. A wet ceiling in a house you don’t service is still not your job.
This week, take the last five clients you signed.
For each one, write down what happened in the month before they called you. If you don’t know, ask them. People like being asked, and the answer is usually one sentence.
Then go read your homepage and see whether any of those five would recognize their own month in it.
Get after it.
