What to prepare before the first call with a business

A cold message getting answered is good news and a deadline at once. When the other side says “let’s talk”, the call usually lands the next day, so preparation is never a day’s work; it is whatever fifteen minutes you can find inside that day. Knowing in advance what goes into those minutes changes the call.

Four things to gather

All of them come from public sources and none of them needs guessing.

The concrete state of the current site. Open it on a phone, look at three pages, measure the load. Two sentences will do: what does not work, and how that feels to a customer. The expanded version of the finding you already wrote.

How the business gets customers. Are bookings taken by phone, through social accounts, or on a platform? The answer tells you how critical the site actually is to this business, and that shapes the whole offer.

Two comparisons from the sector. The sites of two businesses doing the same work in the same district. The comparison exists to give scale: “somewhere similar to yours solved this like so” reads far more concretely than an abstract suggestion and leaves a picture in the other person’s head.

What the next step is. What do you want to happen when the call ends? Send a proposal, meet on site, share a case. Pick one answer.

Two things not to bring

A ready-made price. A number written before hearing what the business wants lands either too high, ending the conversation there, or too low, and it can never be raised afterwards. Price belongs to the second call.

A long presentation. The first call is a listening call. Most of the talking time belongs to the other side, because the information that will shape your offer lives over there rather than in your slides.

Three questions to ask

Few of them, and open-ended, is enough.

How do customers find you at the moment? What do you complain about most on the site? And if this gets solved, what actually changes for you?

The third question gives you the most. If the answer is “more bookings” the job in front of you is a conversion job, and if it is “fewer phone calls” it is an automation job, and those are two entirely separate projects. The prices differ too.

The ten minutes after the call

Write the notes immediately. An hour later the detail has gone and all that remains is a general impression, which is worth roughly nothing when you sit down to write the proposal.

Four lines: what they want, what they said about budget, who makes the decision, when to come back. Those go into the finding field on the record and set up the whole of the next contact.