I’ve never done outbound sales. All my deals come inbound from Twitter. It’s amazing, it’s the best (and you probably found me from there). If you don’t know where to start follow Brandon Zhang who grew to 10k followers in a few months. He’s been an inspiration to me.

My Twitter following and sales volume are directly proportional. Here’s the growth since June 30th.

So our website is built on Notion (here’s how). It follows a rather standard structure. The main conversation point is the x.ai embed. You can embed a lot of web apps and widgets with Notion and they render perfectly with Super (affiliate link). Here’s how the discovery call booking window looks on optemization.com

So I use x.ai for call bookings, including discovery calls.

I don’t know if it’s better than Calendly/Acuity/Doodle/etc. I don’t care either. That’s because it does the job for me. I’ve also known the founder & CEO, Dennis Mortensen, since my days at NYU and I like him.

Anyway, here’s how my discovery calls are setup:

Scheduling hours:

Meeting duration: 30 minutes Available dates: Over a period of 30 rolling days Lead time: 2 days Breather time: 30 minutes Available slots: All available Start Time Options: Every 15 minutes Max Meetings Allowed Per Day: 3 meetings

Beyond the obvious setup, I require prospects to mention their company name and explain the project brief.

I toggle “Always confirm meeting requests with me before scheduling” ON because I want to review meeting requests and confirm them. The company name and project brief help me make the decision.

Zapier automatically tags the email with a “sales” label that I have in Gmail. In Superhuman, I’ve triaged my inbox by business function and the confirmation email automatically shows up in the right place.

I review the details of the proposed meeting and decide whether it makes sense to move forward with the call. I strictly reject calls that don’t fit our business. Sometimes I clarify the brief with prospects by forwarding them the booking email.

Once, I confirm the booking, Zapier starts a new thread.

Once the email is sent, I ask the prospect various questions. Here are some:

Generally, I ask people to share their setups and workflows. These usually contain sensitive information, so I make sure to send an NDA. I send docs with HelloSign. In this case, I use the Stripe/Orrick Mutual NDA template that comes with Stripe Atlas incorporation.

If you need to incorporate your business, please use my affiliate link, which will get me $5,000 in processing credits

Sometimes prospects are not ready to move forward with a proposal, so I offer them to join a shared Slack Connect channel where we can chat until they are ready to work together.

Slack Connect is basically a social networking layer on top of Slack and it’s amazing. It allows me to chat with clients and partners without requiring them to constantly switch between workspaces. It does require a premium/paid plan but its worth it.

10 minutes before the call, I create new records in my projects and calendar databases. I have a template for discovery calls that prompts me to ask the right questions and take good notes. Here’s how I create it in my sales dashboard:

After a successful discovery call, I create a custom proposal. It's quick to make because I have it templated in Notion as well. I start with this template:

Finally, I send a service contract with and.co. It’s a solid piece of software for freelancers and agencies. I’m thinking to maybe switch off to a combination of Notion, HelloSign, and Servicebot (embeddable Stripe payment portals) but I’m not sure about that. For now, and.co does the job covering contracts and invoicing.

Sometimes, there are email deliverability issues, so make sure to tell your client to check their spam folders.

I put together the Zapier zap and Notion template into a product that you can purchase for $29.

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