We made it to 200 episodes—and I’m bringing the fire 🔥
I’m taking this opportunity to revisit one of the first truths I ever shared on the podcast: just because someone says no to your offer doesn’t mean your price is the problem. If your bookings have slowed or leads keep ghosting you, it’s time to take a hard look at your systems—not your rates.
I’m breaking down what actually moves someone from “just curious” to “ready to book,” what your system might be missing, and how to figure out where things are falling through the cracks—so you can finally build a client experience that earns more YESes.
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[00:00] Celebrating episode 200 + shoutout to Haylee
[01:11] The real reason people aren’t booking (it’s not your price)
[01:33] Your offer needs a system that supports it
[02:19] Why your website can’t do all the heavy lifting
[04:15] Most creatives build task lists, not client experiences
[04:46] Client journey vs. client experience
[06:16] Are your leads ready to buy?
[07:31] Why consultation calls aren’t just about closing—they’re “decision calls”
[10:32] Sales videos as an alternative to calls
[11:32] Why lowering prices or adding deliverables won’t fix broken systems
[12:25] The role of a client experience audit and what to look for
[13:49] Why offboarding is key to referrals and retention
[14:08] What comes next?
Mentioned in this Episode
Episode 1 – If you keep hearing NO
Episode 101 – What your website really needs
Episode 123 – 3 Videos for Your Client Experience
Client Experience Audit
Gaffin Creative
Review the Transcript:
Hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of The Business First Creatives podcast. In fact, this is episode 200. Now that number feels a little surreal to say out loud. I mean, we all know I like to talk by this point, but was I actually gonna get to 200 episodes?
Uh, I wouldn’t be able to do it without my amazing, awesome podcast manager, Haylee Gaffin. So if you are thinking of starting a podcast, highly recommend Gaffin Creative, because she is the one that makes all of this work.
I’m gonna take this opportunity to bring us full circle back around because I want to revisit the topic that I discussed way back in the very first episode of this podcast.
I shared a spicy little truth, just because someone says no to your offer does not mean that the price is the problem. I hear this a lot, particularly from creatives. If bookings are low, if you get too many NOs in a row, you automatically think, well, maybe I should lower my rates, and I said it then.
I’m gonna say it today, even louder. Don’t blame your prices if your systems are shit. I said it a little nicer in episode one, but I feel like in episode 200, if you are still here, we are probably good friends, right? You enjoy me giving you the real, and so I am going to straight up blame your system.
Because you can have an incredibly well priced, well positioned offer, but if the system around it is messy or confusing, your offer doesn’t even have a fair chance. You are getting NOs and you are blaming your pricing, but you are not looking at the real culprit. So today we are gonna dig into what makes a system actually support your offer and get more yeses.
I wanna zoom out, if you will, to where your customer or client journey typically begins because it doesn’t begin inside of your CRM. It doesn’t begin with a workflow. It starts with however they found you. Whether that is on a podcast or on your website, on Pinterest, on your social media. That’s how they found you, and hopefully wherever they find you you are funneling them to your website to make it do the hard work.
Now, your website might be working, you might have a beautiful services page, an awesome contact page, and if you don’t think that you have these things, I do wanna encourage you to go back to episode 101, where I talk to my real life bestie, Kate Hyde, about what makes a website work. Okay? But if your website is doing the job, it’s only getting you the first YES, which is, I want to know more, but please don’t confuse that with getting a booking. That is not a yes, I am ready to commit. That is curiosity. That is, I am willing to see what the rest of your experience would look like. And so you, as the business owner, need to create a client experience system that takes it from that, “I’m curious” all the way through the rest of their decision. Because an offer, like a listing of what’s included features is typically not what gets you the Yes. It’s building that confidence in what your offer is, that prompts people to sign on the dotted line. Now I know I talk about CRMs a lot, but the problem is most creatives build their systems around what they wanna send, a task list, what CRM templates told them to do.
Not my CRM templates, but other people’s CRM templates. It’s mostly like, here’s my autoresponder, here’s my scheduler, here’s my proposal. But the truth is all of those are task-based. That’s your internal checklist. That is not a client-centered experience, that is a customer journey.
And so I don’t have time in this episode to really distinguish between a client journey and a client experience, but I do want you to think about this for the rest of the episode.
Client journey is the path they take from A to B to C to finally getting booked. The client experience is how you make them feel at each of those touchpoints. One more time. The client journey is the actual path they take to go from inquiry to booked, to delivered, if you will. The client experience is how you make them feel and what you do, in each of those steps, to build confidence in you and your offer.
People make decisions on trust, clarity, timing, and emotional readiness. I’m gonna tell you a secret. When I first started as a photographer way back in 2012, and I first started to build my inquiry processes, I was focused on the ready to book crowd. Everything about my system was, you’ve contacted me, you must want my services, here’s how you can pay me. It was all automated. It was all great, but I wasn’t accounting for the fact that some of those people had not yet made their decision. Now, I was leaning into the fact that my website was an incredible conversion device, like it was taking people from curiosity to ready to book, I think in a way that a lot of websites don’t.
But eventually, because different buyers have different buyer personas, I started to get more inquiries from people who were just kicking the tires. They hadn’t already gone through the process of going from the curiosity to ready to book on my website, and so they needed a little more from me, and that is when I modified what my system was.
So what I think a good client experience system is now is that you are answering questions before they ask. You are anticipating their hesitation and addressing the objections before they even make them You are reassuring them that they are in the right place. They have contacted the right photographer or the right creative for what their end goal is,
Most importantly, you need to make the next step easy, which is once they are convinced that you are the person that they want to hire, have you made it easy for them to do so? That is why I harp all the time about my five minute booking process. But there are some things that you must do between the inquiry and the five minute booking process to get them ready to say yes.
Let’s talk about sales calls for a moment. There is a reason why most business coaches will tell you to get your prospective clients on a call, whether it’s an actual phone call or it’s a video conferencing call on Zoom. The truth is getting on a call usually helps you close the deal easier, and that’s because you can hear their voice.
You can catch their hesitation. You can see what part of your offer or your process is confusing and you can address it there. So sales calls definitely have a place, and they are definitely a way to increase your conversion rates overall. Not everybody has time for a consultation call, and it doesn’t take a consultation call to get the sale.
I’m gonna take it even one step further. The goal of a consultation call isn’t to make a sale. Lemme say that one more time. The goal, at least of my consultation calls isn’t to make a sale. It’s to give them clarity. It’s to help someone make a confident decision in whether or not they are ready to hire me, whether I am actually giving them the service that they want.
That’s why I call them decision calls. Now, decision calls doesn’t look good on a website. It doesn’t really ring when I say it out loud, but in truth, my sales calls are decision calls. It is to make sure that we are aligned with each other. The offer that I have is what will actually solve your problem, and I give you all the information that you need in order to make a decision.
Now if that decision is yes, great. You’re gonna fill out my proposal and we are gonna continue on the client experience. But if you say no, I’m okay with that too, because you are gonna find someone that is a better fit than I was. And once again, when I get that, no, my first thought is not, oh, I must have been too expensive.
It’s not, my first thought is, okay, I was not the photographer for them. Whatever it was that I was offering is not what they needed at this time. And that’s okay because now they have clarity. I have clarity and I can close their project and basically move on. So not every business needs to include calls as part of their process, but your system should do the equivalent of a call if you’re not having one.
There are many other ways that you can build confidence in you as the service provider and your offer, as in the result that they’re going to get without having a call. In fact, I love to talk about sales videos. If you can record a video that is short and to the point and adequately explains your process from beginning to end, that is gonna be just as good as actually hopping on a synchronous call with someone.
So if you haven’t tried making a sales video , I highly recommend that, especially for those of you that have no inclination, or time, in order to get on a sales call.
Okay, so let’s get into the nitty gritty of your system. Let’s say that you’ve built a system that’s amazing, but people aren’t saying yes.
Okay. What does that mean? Again, don’t blame your prices. Don’t assume that it’s the market, and please don’t start overthinking your offer. Sometimes people are like, well, if I lower my prices, they’ll hire me. Other times people are like, well, if I increase the number of images I give, they’ll hire me.
Neither one of those is necessarily true. You might need to have additional touchpoints in your client experience that gives them the confidence to say yes to you and actually pay you money. Okay? So I want you to take a hard look at your system. Okay, this is where the audit comes in. I know I am on a client experience audit, but to be truthful, the audit is where you are going to get the questions that you need answered because again.
Probably not your offer, but if you get a client experience audit, and I do think that there’s a problem with your offer, whether you don’t have clarity in exactly what your process is and exactly what they’re gonna get at the end of the service. I’m gonna tell you that if there are parts of your system that have gaps in either communication or where I feel like you are dropping the ball, I’m gonna tell you that too.
Okay, so in my client experience audits, I walk your system just like a prospective client would I flag the friction, the mixed signals and the missed opportunities? I give you what I think are a list of critical errors. These are things that you must fix immediately because they are more than likely hindering your ability to book clients.
And then I give you a bunch of like suggested touch points where. You’re not doing this, but I feel like if you did this, people would have more confidence in your offer and moving forward. And just so that you know. This is not just to get somebody to book with you. You need an amazing client experience from beginning to end because that offboarding period or that delivery period where you are actually giving them the photos or the finished website or the finished copy, that is actually what’s most correlated to customer satisfaction.
So not only do you wanna. Have all these things when you’re trying to get them to say yes and commit to the booking, you have to follow through until the end because that is when they’re gonna brag about hiring you. That is when they’re gonna refer you to all their friends. That is when they need your service again, they are gonna come back to you.
Okay? So if you are ready to hear more yeses from people who have. Already indicated that they love your work and they’re curious about more. If you go to coley james.com/client experience audit, that’s when you can get my eyes on your system. Now, if you feel like you need a little baby step, I do have a self audit quiz that you can take, and that’s at coley james.com/audit.
Okay, thank you. For hanging with me for 200 episodes and I hope to see you in 200 more. That’s it for this episode. See you next time.
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