A Surprising Discovery About Discovery Calls

Perhaps the biggest concern for therapists is maximising the number of visitors to your website who get in contact with you. Looking at the figures for your website can be fairly shocking. Less than 1% of your visitors actually seek your help! What on earth is going on with the other 99%?

Website metrics can be very frustrating, as they show limited information about where all these visitors come from and how they found you. The first thing to realise is that all sites get a lot of background noise. While some of these “visitors” are potential clients, an awful lot won’t be.

There may be “spiders” from the search engines looking at your content, competitors browsing your site, and all sorts of marketing businesses trying to sell you their services. These will often pop up in your inbox or annoy you with calls. These extra visitors often outnumber potential clients.

The last 2 figures in this chart below are interesting. They show a bigger potential problem. There are a lot of unsavoury characters on the web who are looking for ways to make money from you without your permission. They use automated tools to look out for sites that have security holes they can exploit. They scan your site looking for weakness and obsolete code which they can hack. They also try to guess your password. If they get in, they frequently post all sorts of malware. This is the main reason to always keep your site up-to-date. It’s pretty unlikely that you have logged into your site 210 times, but this clearly shows that someone is trying to break in!

Anyway, amid this noise, there are genuine clients who would benefit from your help. Our focus has to be on building our website to maximise the number of clients getting in touch.

Part of this is about using the same language as your clients. They do not understand hypnotherapy, so using all sorts of acronyms is not going to work. The same goes for complex terms like regression. The magic here is to understand that they have a problem and want help fixing it. Use their language, and your results will improve.

Many of us, particularly if you have come through schools such as RTT, will be heavily focused on using discovery calls. These calls serve many purposes. Done properly, they help you select the clients that you can help and weed out the time wasters. Like many other people, I have invited clients on my website to book a free discovery call as an initial step to help them. Many hypnotists start with a similar call.

When I was working with my wife, looking at the statistics to see how I could further improve the number of people that get in contact, she mentioned that a discovery call is our language, and not that of our clients. When you think about this, people are hesitant to get in contact, and a discovery call actually sounds a bit intimidating. Just as an experiment, we decided to invite everyone for a friendly chat instead. It’s early days, but it looks like we have got 25% more people coming through by just changing the name of this first call! It just goes to show that we get so wrapped up with our own jargon that it can move us away from using the language of our clients!

Author Profile

Steve Butler
Steve has spent his career working in technology, focused on using technology to improve processes, reduce effort and harness the power of data.

Steve intimately understands Google and technologies critical to a therapy business today. He understands the algorithms and has tremendous insights into emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence that present an incredible opportunity for therapists. His knowledge allows us as therapists to reach our target audience and for our target audience to find the right therapist for them. Steve has worked extensively around leveraging technology for hypnotherapists for the last three years.

Steve is an expert in organic marketing, allowing hypnotherapists to grow credibility and online ‘authority’ without the need for expensive advertising or hours on social media.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *