Why Run It: To capture leads
Who It's For: Businesses who offer consultative services or packages
Implementation time: 25-30min
Play Snapshot
As a coach or consultant, or any business that offers consultative services, few plays are as powerful as scheduling a free consultation. This play gives your business the opportunity to win over a lead while also building an ongoing relationship. Capturing a lead and driving them to a value filled consult is one of the most popular lead capture plays, that lends itself towards nurturing and converting a lead after the promised consult occurs. For this play, we will want to stay focused on driving leads to signup for a consult with you or one of your team members. It’s challenging to capture leads as a consultant. A consult is oftentimes the best way to scope if a new lead is a good fit as a potential buyer or client. Making yourself available, whether it be face to face, on the phone, or a video call, helps the lead overcome any uneasiness they may feel as they explore your products and services. By using a free consultation as a lead magnet you get many benefits:
- Are they the right fit? By meeting with someone, you can decide if what you offer is what they are looking for.
- Show your stuff. This gives you the opportunity to show why you are the option for them. Making yourself available is a great way to build trust. Trust leads to buying decisions.
- Be valuable. Your conversation should be valuable, why are they coming to you? Give them a taste of how you can make their life better, with you in it. It shouldn’t be about the sale the entire time, if you show value, they will buy.
The cornerstone of this play is having a planned approach to your consultation. It should be set up to not only serve and qualify your leads. But also sell to them and close the deal if they are ready. Your consultation should be 15-30min depending on your service. Best of all you will use the power of automation to make this a set it and let it run automation that will keep filling your funnel, which can help you follow-up appropriately based on the outcomes of your consultation.
Pro Tip: Be creative with your call to action in your advertising and broadcast(s) of your free consultation. People are more likely to want to take advantage of your offer with a compelling CTA.
Play Components:
1. Booking Page
Your booking page explains the value of the free consultation and invites people to schedule time with you. This can be a dedicated scheduling page or an embedded scheduling widget on one of your website pages or landing pages. The booking page creates a clear “next step” for interested leads who want more information before they decide to become a client.
2. Booking Form
Your booking form is where the lead can select an available appointment time and it’s also the tool you use to capture the lead’s contact information. This is important because you can then send appointment reminders and other follow-up communication in the future. Because the booking form integrates with your calendar, it means you can automatically have your schedule filled up while you are also capturing leads!
3. Booking Confirmation
Once a visitor books a consultation, your confirmation process ensures that the lead has all the details for the appointment and is clear how they can best prepare. Sending an email and/or text message with all the appointment details makes it convenient for your future customer who may have been in a rush when they first scheduled. Simple appointment reminders decrease the chance of a “no show”, which means more appointments and more sales.
When you run this play you utilize some of the most powerful functions of Keap. You automate the intake process for your leads and gather the key information you need to help you close more business. Your free consultation is a great way to get leads on the hook as a coach and consultant since you simultaneously give something away for free and qualify your leads all in one fell swoop. You have the ability to run this play with a couple of different lead capture methods:
- Use a public form to capture your lead information
- Create a landing page dedicated to your free consult
- Utilize Keap Appointments to automatically schedule your free consult and gather lead information
For this play we recommend using the built in appointment feature in your Keap App. Doing this simplifies the scheduling process and allows you to focus on fielding your new leads and focusing on delivering your consultation.
Creating your booking form in Keap should only take a couple of minutes. We recommend setting up a new appointment type for your free consultation. Set the duration, add in any relevant information that will go into the calendar invite for your lead (like your zoom link or any forms you may need them to fill out before the consult), and then connect your calendar to automatically pull in your availability.
Checkpoints to Launch:
Setup your new appointment type
Connect your calendar and set your availability
You can build an Easy Automation or an Advanced Automation for your consultation confirmation -- there are templates below in the Automations Bank for both options. The confirmation should be short and sweet, don't bury the important information in a lot of text. Provide a clear and simple confirmation message, with a way for your lead to add the consultation to their calendar and the link or phone number they'll need to join you on time. If you intend to call them, that's a great thing to add so they know to wait for your call instead of looking for a link or phone number. The confirmation is all about expectation setting.
- What does the lead need to do in the days or hours before the free consult?
- What can they expect from you during your time together?
Sending the confirmation right away is standard practice - no need to delay that email. After the email is sent, it's up to you to decide if you need to do any internal automating. Does someone else on your team need to be assigned a task beforehand? Do you need to look over the information that they included during the booking process? You can automate task creation immediately after the confirmation email is sent.
Pro Tip: Add a history tag to each lead that books an appointment so you know they came in via a free consultation. In the future this will be very helpful for segmenting your list when you run other plays.
Checkpoints to Launch:
Create your automation starting with your new appointment type as the trigger
Insert the email copy you will use to deliver your confirmation
Test the email and any links included
Decide if you want to create any tasks for yourself before the consult
The booking form can either be shared directly, or embedded onto a page on your site. The benefit to having it on a page on your site is the ability to add extra context about your business, the services you offer, and why people should work with you. You can start the expectation setting right on the page, showing your potential leads the value that you'll bring in the free consultation, and begin to sell them on what you do.
Checkpoints to Launch:
Insert the booking form onto your site.
Test the form and confirmation automation and make sure the emails look how you want.
Go To Easy Automation Template
Success Metrics
Primary: # of free consultations scheduledMeasure this by doing a contact search for the # of contacts with the history tag that you added while you were creating your automation.
Booking rate (what % of booking page visitors actually schedule a consult)
Show rate (what % of scheduled consults attend)
Conversion rate (what % of consults end in a sale)
Common Next Plays
- Free Consultation Pre-suasion
- Free Consultation
- Sales pipeline
- Newsletter
Done For You
If you don’t have the time or desire to build out this play yourself, we’ve got you covered!With our Done For You Play Blueprint professional services, our experts will create your content, build the automations, and even set up reporting right in your app so your play can be up and running in about a week.
How does it work?
Download above image - Schedule-a-Free-Consult.pdf
- Scoping call – You’ll have a call with one of our experts to understand your business and what you want in your play, and go over the process.
- Expert goes to work – Your expert builds the play components (forms, emails, automations, etc.) in your app and develops any related content. They also set up reporting in your app. This takes about 3-5 business days after the scoping call.
- Review call – The expert walks you through what was set up and how the reporting works.