The marketing tactic that never works

Have you ever gotten an email or seen a website with “Schedule a free consultation”?

Of course, you have. We all have.

The problem: Free consultations don’t convert.

Now, I know we should never say never. But we’ve tried it for family-owned businesses we work with, and the click rate is 0%.

Think about it—how often have you taken advantage of a free consultation when it’s offered?

Maybe once or twice. Probably never.

As a CEO of a small to mid-sized company, you know how important 1 to 1 time with prospects is for building trust. Offering a free consultation seems like a no-brainer.

Financial consultations to discuss financial goals, IT issue troubleshooting consultations, free meetings to discuss a product…

These may all seem like good ways to provide value to potential customers.

But as marketers, we’ve compared its effectiveness to other offers like whitepapers and calculators, and it just doesn’t stack up.

One of the main reasons why is that it’s offered too soon in the buying process.

With the power of the internet, buyers are more informed than ever, and they’re doing a lot of research before they even talk to your salesperson.

Prospects see the free consultation as a sales pitch. Not true help.

People are wise to sales tactics. You have to return to why you do what you do in the first place and work from a place of honesty and a real desire to help. Not sell.

That’s why offers like a valuable white paper or a payment calculator tend to work better.

These offers work because they provide value upfront without requiring the customer to commit to a meeting that may or may not get them closer to what they want.

I get it. The free consultation can be appealing because you don’t have to do any work until you’re actually talking to the prospect.

But the truth is, you have to earn that conversation by building trust first.

There are several ways to provide value to prospects and help them trust you:

An informative blog post helps someone figure out the challenge they didn’t have a handle on. That earns trust.
An effective email helps a prospect see that they don’t have to figure out their problem on their own and that plenty of others face similar challenges. That earns trust.
A white paper shows them the exact steps to take to overcome challenges and achieve goals. That earns trust.

Then, they’ll be ready to say, ‘How can we work together?’

A wise coach once told me, “It isn’t a sales conversation until they have said they are interested. Until then, just help.”

Change your mindset from selling to helping by creating your Answer Vault.

The Answer Vault is a marketing framework for CEOs that are the chief marketing officer of their company.

Use your Answer Vault to build your website, improve your email marketing, and shorten your sales cycle by providing your expertise to prospects throughout their buying journey.

Discover how with your Answer Vault, prospects will find you, trust you, and choose you.

Want a FREE consultation to learn more about the Answer Vault framework?

Yeah, we didn’t think so either. 😉