When you’re selling services, closing the sale often requires an actual conversation, whether you call it a sample session, free consultation, or just an appointment. But savvy business owners know you can improve your success—and make that conversation shorter and easier—if you do a good job of pre-selling the prospect ahead of time.

Instead of having prospects show up to the call (or meeting) to decide if they want to work with you—your goal is to get them to show up knowing they want to work with you and that it’s just a matter of finalizing the details.

The good news is a lot of the effort to create this shift only needs to be done once. You simply need to create the right copy and tweak how you handle prospective clients.

An Interview—the Core of the Pre-Selling Copy

First, create an “Interview” page on your website that is similar to a FAQ, but has a more personal, casual tone. It should include four important elements:

1. Your story about how you came to do what you do. Don’t just recite your experience like you do on your “About Us” page. Write it as a story. This will give them insight into who you are and help establish your credibility—building that all-important know, like and trust factor.

2. Typical questions you’re asked during these appointments: how does it work, what makes you different, etc. Having to answer them over and over again is a waste of your time. Doing it here will also give the prospects information necessary to make their decision before the call. Write your answers in a conversational style, as if you were saying it aloud, so it doesn’t sound like you’re writing a software user’s manual.

3. A pre-empting of prospects’ common objections or points of resistance. Addressing it here will allow you to think about what you want to say and then say it well, instead of stumbling through a response on the call. Again, it helps moves the prospect into the mindset of how they will work with you, not if they will. Two things to remember:
- Phrase their objection and your response in a neutral, matter-of-fact tone
- Only include the most important, most common ones

4. A mention of cost. Of course, the biggest point of resistance is often cost. I’ve heard arguments for and against posting prices for your big-ticket services on your website. I agree that discussing price during the conversation, after you’ve built some rapport and shown the full value of your services for them, is likely to be most successful. But you also don’t want to have a 30-minute conversation before discovering the prospect’s price expectations are way out of touch with reality.

So my strategy is to take the middle ground. Include a question such as “How much do your services cost?” Elaborate on what goes into providing that service (especially if there’s behind-the-scenes work they may not realize). Then give some kind of reference point. On my soon-to-launch site, I mention that one of the least expensive copywriting projects is an informational web page (About Us, Services, etc), which start at a couple hundred dollars per page.

For one client, we said the cost of disability insurance is usually less than you’d pay for cable TV in a year. This not only gets them into the ballpark, it also highlights that they’re probably already spending a similar amount on something much less important to their family’s well-being.

Next week we’ll talk about one other copy element (which you probably already have). We’ll also cover how to tweak your process to more effectively pre-sell prospective clients on your services before the appointment.