How to “Sell” a Free Consultation

In this week’s episode, I wanted to give a little bit of a tutorial about “free consultations.”

It’s an important (or even expected!) part of the sales process, especially for large ticket or complex purchases. People want to be able to talk to someone, ask questions about their specific situation and priorities.

Sadly, “free consultations have been so overused that it’s hard to book them. Some bad actors in the field have made “free consultation” synonymous to “pitchfest” in the minds of many prospects.

So, they don’t book a consultation. Or run away screaming bloody murder when you suggest one.

So, “selling” a free consultation is your first sales task.

It’s really important to offer a consultation and it’s really important to offer a good one.

Now, if you just kind of do this off the cuff and you’re not getting as many consultations as you like, you might want to think about the fact that you have to sell a consultation just the same as you sell anything else. It is a product or a service that takes time, you know, whether or not you’re asking for any compensation as a result of that, you know, even if you offer a free consultation, it still takes time on the part of the person that you are selling to on the part of the prospect.

And there have been so many people doing free consultations that are just simply a pitchfest that a lot of people are pretty worried about how that works. So you want to make sure that you’re telling people what’s involved with your consultation. You know, how much time it’s really going to take, how they can prepare for it? What they can expect to get out of it, whether or not it will be confidential, who will be involved in that process.

All of that is good information and I got this idea from Marcus Sheridan. He had a post on LinkedIn about a really, really good video. That a hair loss company is using to book more consultations and he’s talking about landing pages and that part of the marketing process, but this landing page, the result of it, you know, what is basically selling is a free consultation.

So you want to think about that and think about your landing page, think about the sales process leading up to your consultation after your consultation. We even have an entire unit in our Aviation Sales Basics Course, about how to do a good consultation. We have a nice tip sheet in there for our students, for how they can improve their consultation process.

So give that some thought and if you’d like some help with either your consultation process or if you’d like to make a video like the one that Marcus Sheridan is using. We actually made one of our own that we’re going to be using on our consultation process so I’ll link to that from here.

If you’re watching this video, you may be considering the big step of using an outside Aviation marketing company for the first time or you might simply want to know more about what we have to offer at ABCI we know your time is valuable and that in trusting someone with a frank conversation about your company situation, takes a considerable amount of trust.

We’ve helped many Aviation companies, just like you. We listen to your concerns and help you find the best solutions to help you stay in control every step of the way. Remember, that everything about this consultation, including your contact information, your answers on our questionnaire and the entire consultation process is private and stays between us.

Simply choose a time from the calendar below that is convenient for you. We’ll send you an email from us with a link to a consultation questionnaire. Your answers on this questionnaire will help us prepare so that we can make the best possible use of our time together. And only make recommendations that are actually going to be useful and relevant for you. We prefer to use a zoom consultation. It’s the next best thing to meeting face-to-face and you’ll be able to share exactly what you like and dislike about your current marketing and we’ll be able to share some things with you.

We can’t wait to meet with you. We love learning more about Aviation companies and their Journeys and we’d appreciate the opportunity to be a part of it whether that results in a long-term relationship or simply an exchange of ideas and perhaps a referral to the most appropriate resources for you. Either way, the aviation industry is a small world and we both win by learning more. We look forward to speaking with you.

Here, so you can see that in action if you would like. So, we’ll see you next week. Go sell more stuff. The industry needs the business.