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You book a call, send the automated confirmation your booking tool spits out, and show up 30 minutes later hoping the conversation does all the work. Half the time the prospect’s unprepared, doesn’t remember why they booked, or just doesn’t show.
So you start eyeing what everyone else is doing: charging for the call itself to weed out the tire-kickers before they waste your time. (It filters out plenty of serious buyers too. You just don’t see them leave. 🤷🏻♀️)
Once your website starts sending well-informed leads your way (Andie’s Day 4 tip), the next question is what happens between the moment they book and the moment you’re actually on the call. Talica Davies would tell you that’s exactly where deals are won or lost, and it has nothing to do with charging.
Talica is a revenue strategist who’s closed over $750M in career sales and helped founder-led businesses raise their close rates by 70%+. Her take: charging for a discovery call is a band-aid. It filters out the buyers who’d view that fee as friction, including plenty of serious ones, and signals you don’t know how to sell.
The actual fix is what Talica calls her pre-sales process, everything that happens between someone booking and getting on the call with you.
Why It Works
Charging for a call treats the symptom after the fact. A real pre-sales process addresses the actual thing buyers are reacting to: not wanting to feel like their time doesn’t matter and not knowing what they’re walking into.
Running a sales call is like hosting a dinner party. You welcome people into your home, let them know when you’ll be eating, offer them a drink, take their coat. The first five minutes of an actual sales call work the same way, you’re setting the table before anything else can happen. When someone’s been prepped this well, the call stops feeling like a vendor pitch and starts feeling like two people already mid-conversation.
Results
- One of Talica’s coaching clients went from a 23% close rate to 50% after adding a personal pre-call touch (an excited confirmation email plus a short video the day before), then climbed to 70% with more testing.
- In sales, a structured pre-call reminder sequence can reduce appointment no-shows by roughly 20–30%. (Calendly)
How you can do it
What you can knock out on your lunch hour
- Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes. Write down what they’re afraid of walking into this call, what they need to feel certain about before they’ll say yes to anything, and what information about your work would actually help them, not impress them, before they talk to you.
When you have more time, here’s where it goes next
2. Send a real email the moment they book, not the generic one your scheduling tool auto-generates. Show excitement, remind them why you’re worth talking to, link to a testimonial or proof point, and tell them plainly what the call is actually for.
3. Send a second, personal touch the day before, referencing something specific about their industry or situation. This is the one that does the heavy lifting, it’s the difference between a prospect who shows up cold and one who shows up already leaning in.
4. Require an intake form 24 hours out, and hold the line on it. If it’s not submitted, the call doesn’t happen. It’s a boundary, not a formality, and it does the qualifying work charging was supposed to do without the friction. Whether that form lives inside your booking flow or gets sent as a separate follow-up is worth testing on your own, Talica says it comes down to your volume and how each version affects conversion.
Here’s exactly what’s on Talica’s:
- Name (First Name / Last Name)
- Phone Number
- What’s prompting you to seek out sales support now?
- What are your approximate monthly revenues?
- Where does most of your revenue come from right now? Name the offers.
- If revenue stalled tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d suspect is broken?
- What needs to be true 90 days from now, for this to have been worth your time?
- How did you hear about us?
5. Control the first five minutes of the actual call. Welcome them in, lay out the agenda, tell them exactly how the time will be spent. Limit rapport-building to a few minutes, not the whole call, and don’t run a rigid, question-by-question script either. Both leave you with nothing to show for 30 minutes. Talica’s own opener sounds similar to this: “Can’t wait to talk to you. I’ve got some questions from your intake form that I want to dig into, and after that, if I think we’re a fit, I’ll let you know what that looks like to work together.”
Tools
- Anything that allows you to customize your confirmation emails
Once your pre-sales process has someone showing up prepared and already leaning in, the next problem is often the dreaded pricing conversation. That’s Shara’s Day 13 tip.
See you tomorrow,
Stacy
P.S. Talica Davies is a revenue strategist based in Vancouver who diagnoses why founder-led expert businesses can’t sell without the founder in every deal, then redesigns the sales process so it can run without living entirely in their head. Find her on LinkedIn and subscribe to her newsletter.
