Why Your Best Leads Don’t Convert

Hello, hello, and welcome back to another solo episode on Business First Creatives, the podcast for creatives building intentional businesses rooted in clarity, consistency, and a whole lot of heart. Okay, let’s be honest, how did that sound? I love talking about clarity and consistency, and so I’m testing that out as like the new tagline.

Hit me up and tell me what you think. Okay, but today I wanna unpack things that most of us have felt. Regardless of how long you’ve been in business, you are attracting the right people. They’re saying the right things, and then they disappear. You’re doing the marketing. Your work is solid, but the inquiry hits your inbox and it fizzles.

Today I wanna talk about why that happens and why your client experience might be missing Something that is leading to these people ghost in you and you know what kind of lead. I mean they found you through a referral. They’ve been engaging on your Instagram. They use Word like obsessed, finally found you.

You’re exactly what I’ve been looking for. And then silence. It’s easy to think when someone ghosts you that you’ve done something wrong, but more often than not, it’s not about something that you said or something that you intentionally did. It’s not about your pricing, and it’s not even about your portfolio because your portfolio is probably what had them reach out to you in the first place.

It’s about how consistent and confident the next step feels. The experience between I’m interested and I’m booked has to match that energy of your brand. So let’s get real about the four places where things tend to break down the first delayed or impersonal replies. Now I shout from the rooftop every single time I have the opportunity to, but the moment that someone inquires about your services using a contact form, they should immediately get an email that confirms that you have received it.

I have talked about this ad nauseum, and I am going to link a few of my favorite podcast episodes related to your automated lead response inside of the show notes. But if they have to wait days to get that reply, I. Or if your response sounds like a copy paste template, it immediately dulls the spark that they had when they filled out your contact form and the excitement that they felt about working with you.

They start to second guess if you’re the right person for them or if your services are going to live up to the hype of what they found on your website. The second place where things tend to break down is if you are giving them overwhelming or unclear information. Sometimes we think we’re being helpful by sending everything.

You know what I mean? You have an automated lead response email that tells them to look at eight different links. Y’all, that’s too much. It’s too many links. It’s too many packages. It’s too many things for them to look at. They have already decided that they are interested in hearing more from you by filling out your contact form and the next steps that you tell them to take.

Have to be specific and have clarity so that they don’t feel like you are overwhelming them with all of the information on your website, and that the rest of the experience is not going to be personalized and customized. Okay, so when people are overwhelmed, they don’t move forward. Every single piece of your client experience needs to be crafted with careful thought.

The third place where I see things break down is no emotional connection. If they’re super excited to work with you and then they get an email that doesn’t match that same energy, they are immediately turned off. Likewise, if they get emails from you that are what we would call a little bit more professional language that you wouldn’t use every day or that you definitely don’t use when you’re popping into your stories on Instagram every day, they are going to lose the sense of connection that they got from you, depending on where they found you, if they were really excited to work with you after reading all of your posts on Instagram, watching all of your stories.

And then they go to your website and they’re getting the same vibes and that very first email that they received is like very clean language and doesn’t match the person that they thought that they were speaking to. They are gonna go from the hell yes, energy to the maybe, I think I should look at other options.

The fourth thing where things tend to break down is during your sales call or after you have sent the proposal. Now. This episode is not about telling you whether or not you should do sales calls or not. I actually have one of those kinds of episodes coming up in a few weeks, but this is when I’m telling you whichever path you take, you have to be clear because this is when the decision gets made, whether you’re hopping on a sales call with them or you’re directly sending them a proposal, if that sales call.

Doesn’t match the energy. If that sales call isn’t a very consistent conversation. If it feels like you are grasping and pulling things out of thin air, if you seem to be wishy-washy on what your offer is, what the price is, and what they’re actually gonna deliver, or in the case of a proposal, if it’s missing key, important elements, they are gonna walk away from either the sales call.

Or looking at the proposal with indecision, they are not gonna know how to proceed because they don’t understand what it is that you are laying out an offering. So just wanna say this clearly, you don’t need a sales call to convert, but you absolutely need to be clear on your offer for whichever path you take.

And so whether you’re saying it with your chest on a sales call, or you’re writing it very clearly in a proposal. Clear prices, clear inclusions, and confident delivery is how you are going to get people to say yes. So let’s talk about how you can build confidence through clarity and how you can make that decision making moment feel easy and aligned for the leads that are inquiring with you.

If you do sales calls, I want you to know your flow. I want you to lead the call with curiosity. That means you don’t get on a call and basically treat it like a sales presentation. You have to let the client talk. You have to let them tell you why they were interested you in first place and what it is that they are actually looking for.

Even if you think that they were crystal clear on their inquiry form. Give them the opportunity to speak. I always think that client-led sales calls work a lot better than business-led sales calls. Let them talk. Let them ask questions in your mind. You know the points that you have to hit, but you should be able to do it and let the client feel like they are being seen and heard at the same time.

The second thing, which I know that some of us struggle with this a lot, but I want you to talk about your pricing openly. I do not want you to apologize for your pricing. I do not want you to assume that your prices are too high. I do not want you to start negotiating with yourself and offering to lower your price right after you’ve said your price.

And the last thing that I want you to do in a sales call is be clear with the next steps. If you are gonna send them a proposal in the next 15 minutes, say that. If the next step is for them to review the proposal, sign the contract, and pay you your money, which all of you guys know, I’m a big fan of that five minute booking process.

Tell them what to expect at the end of the sales call rather than leaving it open-Ended. Okay, so what if you’re not doing a sales call? If you’re leading with a proposal, I want you to make the email that sends the proposal be warm, personal and simple. The email is not where you should lay out all the details.

You want them to click that button. You want them to go to the proposal and see every little bit that you’ve included, like a warm message. Your social proof, you’re frequently asked questions. Look at the actual offer to see the benefits and the features laid out in the written word. You want your proposal to do the talking for you.

You wanna show the value inside of the proposal if you are not having a personal conversation with them. And last, you need everything in there that they need to say. Yes. That’s your price, your process, your timeline, and what comes next. Sales calls, work, proposals work, but the common thread in both is consistency in your voice and clarity in your offer, whichever one you do.

That is what leads to people actually saying yes to your offer. Okay, so here’s what I want you to hear me say. Your best leads don’t need more convincing. They need you to show confidence in your offer, and they need you to clearly identify and communicate what it is that they get when they say yes. Now if you need support in identifying where you might be falling flat, I would love to do a client experience audit with you.

This is when I look at your CRM setup to make sure that you are using all of the features, and then I actually walk through your entire customer experience for one offer for beginning to end. I identify the critical errors where. You are actually losing people in the process or where your system might be betraying you.

And then I give you my personal suggestions on how to make the client experience better so that you can in fact get more of these amazing leads to say yes. All right. I hope that this episode has helped you see how you can identify and clearly lay out a path for your leads to say yes. That’s it for this episode.

I’ll see you next time.