~by Haley Lynn Gray~
I once ran a hundred twenty-minute sessions in two months.
Not consultations, not sales calls. Short conversations where I gave one genuinely useful piece of advice and then got off the phone.
It remains one of the most effective things I’ve done for getting clients, and the reason it works isn’t the one most people assume.
How it works
Set up an online scheduler with twenty-minute slots and ten minutes between them. The gap matters — it lets you write notes and stops you running late, which would undo the good impression immediately.
On the call, you understand their situation well enough to offer one good tip. You give it properly. Then you ask whether they think it’ll help, and you finish.
That’s the whole thing. No pitch, no next-step funnel, no seventeen-point diagnostic.
Why the follow-up is the entire point
The call isn’t where you get clients. The follow-up is.
A few days later you message them, referencing the specific date and the specific recommendation: did you try it? What happened? Any questions?
That message is doing something clever, and it’s worth understanding why it’s so effective.
It isn’t a sales call. It’s a genuine question about something you helped with, which makes it completely comfortable to send and comfortable to receive. And the answer — whatever it is — naturally opens the next conversation.
If it worked, they now have direct evidence that you’re useful. If they haven’t tried it, you’ve discovered something about whether they act on advice, which is worth knowing. If they tried it and hit a complication, you’re straight into the real conversation.
Most people run free calls and then have to construct a reason to follow up. This builds the reason into the call itself.
The discipline of not going deep
The hard part is stopping.
Twenty minutes is not enough to do justice to a complicated situation, and attempting it does the person a disservice — you’ll give confident advice based on a fraction of the picture. So the limit isn’t a sales tactic, it’s honesty about what a short conversation can produce.
Keep it manageable, too. If your field touches on difficult personal territory — health, money, anything where people carry distress — be deliberate about scope. A twenty-minute slot is not the place for someone’s full history, and letting it become that helps nobody and will exhaust you by call nine.
A phrase that works: “There’s a lot here and I want to do it justice — let me give you the one thing I’d change first, and we can talk properly if it’s useful.”
What I’d say differently now
Two honest updates.
The free call is no longer novel. In 2016 offering one stood out. Now everyone offers a discovery call, and most of them are thinly disguised sales pitches — which means people arrive braced for it.
That’s an argument for doing it properly rather than abandoning it. The differentiator is that you genuinely give something and genuinely don’t pitch. People notice immediately, because it’s now unusual.
And a hundred in two months is a great deal. I’d space them differently. Batch them — several in a morning rather than scattered through the week — and cap how many you’ll do, because the quality of the tenth call in a day is not the quality of the first.
Who this works for
I originally wrote this for coaches, and it applies far more broadly.
It works for anyone selling expertise where the value is hard to assess in advance — consultants, designers, accountants, marketers, anyone whose buyer is essentially taking your word for it. A short call where you demonstrably help solves the credibility problem in twenty minutes.
It works less well where the purchase is straightforward or price-driven, because there’s nothing to demonstrate.
The underlying mechanism
This is giving away information to get clients, compressed into twenty minutes and made personal.
Someone who has read your article thinks you might know things. Someone you’ve actually helped, specifically, about their situation, knows it.
That’s the whole advantage, and it’s why the follow-up converts. You’re not asking them to imagine what working with you would be like. They’ve had a small version of it.
More on the wider process of getting clients.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
