If your sales calls aren’t converting the way you’d like, it’s tempting to assume you’re bad at selling. You start questioning your pricing, your offer, maybe your whole business. I see this all the time, especially with women. The moment a few enquiries don’t turn into clients, we reach for the harshest explanation: I’m just not good at sales.
Usually that’s not the problem at all.
Let me tell you about a client of mine.
She sat down with me recently for a 15-minute coaching session. She works with children and their parents, and she was frustrated. Only one of her last three enquiries had converted.
At first glance, she thought she had a sales problem.
When we looked a little deeper, it was something else entirely.
What was actually happening
The more we unpacked her process, the clearer it became that her expertise was never the issue. She’s brilliant at what she does. The way she’d designed the conversation was quietly working against her.
Here’s what we found.
- She was running sales calls over the phone. For a service built on trust and rapport, this was a real handbrake. Parents never got to see her face or read her warmth. They were being asked to hand over the well-being of their child to a voice on the end of a phone, with nothing to anchor that trust to.
- She was squeezing calls into the cracks of her day. No space, no prep, no focus. She’d jump off school pick-up and onto a call, still half in the previous task. When you’re not present, the other person feels it, even if they can’t name it.
- She was overwhelming people with information. Parents came looking for support and left with a firehose of options. They’d arrived already stretched and worried, and the call sent them away with more to think about, not less. Confused people don’t buy. They go away to “have a think” and you never hear from them again.
- She had no consistent structure. Every call looked different, and she’d finish by presenting multiple offers and sending multiple documents. Decision fatigue, every single time. The more choices she gave, the harder it became for anyone to choose.
The result? One conversion from three.
What we changed
Notice what we didn’t touch. We didn’t change her expertise. We didn’t change her pricing. We didn’t rework her marketing. We changed the process, because that’s where the leak was.
- We moved her from phone to Zoom. Now parents could see her face and hear her tone before deciding. That one shift did so much of the trust-building work for her, before she’d even said much at all.
- We built a simple sales structure. A clear beginning, middle and end, so she could guide the conversation with confidence instead of winging it. Structure isn’t restrictive. It’s what lets you stay present, because you’re not scrambling to work out what comes next.
- We simplified her offers. One recommendation. The option she genuinely believed was best for that family. When you know your stuff, the kindest thing you can do is make the decision easy, not hand someone a menu and ask them to diagnose themselves.
- We added a human follow-up backed by a nurture sequence. A real message from her, supported by a system, so nobody slipped through the cracks. Most sales aren’t lost on the call. They’re lost in the silence afterwards.
Her next three calls converted. Three from three!
The real lesson
This isn’t about everyone expecting a 100% conversion rate. That’s not realistic, and it’s not the point.
The point is that sometimes the problem isn’t your offer, your pricing or your ability to sell. Sometimes you’ve simply made it too hard for someone to say yes.
So before you reinvent your business, ask yourself a few honest questions about the conversation you’re inviting people into:
- How does someone first experience you? Can they see and hear you, or are you asking them to trust a stranger sight unseen?
- Are you fully present for these conversations, or squeezing them in between everything else?
- How much are you asking someone to process before they can make a decision?
- Are you guiding them to a clear next step, or leaving them to wade through the options alone?
- And what happens after the call? Does anyone fall through the gap?
The fix is often smaller than you think. And the difference it makes is often bigger than you’d expect. You don’t need a whole new business. You need to make it easy for the right people to say yes.
Want a second set of eyes on your process?
If your sales calls aren’t landing the way you’d like and you can’t quite see why, this is exactly the kind of thing I help women untangle. Often it takes one conversation to spot the gap.
Book a complimentary clarity call with me and let’s have a look together. Sometimes one small change is all it takes to go from one in three to three in three.