Where do first calls come from for a consultant?
First calls come from four sources, and each one responds to deliberate effort:
- Reconnection. The fastest source there is: a warm note to someone who knows your work produces conversations in days.
- Referrals in motion. The people who already send you work send more when they know what you're focused on and that you have room.
- Hand-raisers from your visibility. The quiet readers who step forward when posting turns into conversations on purpose.
- Rooms. A talk or a guest spot puts you in front of a trusted audience, and the conversations trail in afterward.
One piece of market math explains why the mix matters: Ehrenberg-Bass research on business buying found only a small share of companies are in the market for a given service at any one time, with the rest arriving later on their own clocks. Your visibility warms the many who aren't ready. Your invitations catch the few who are. Run both and the calendar stops depending on luck.
How do I invite someone to a call without making it weird?
You invite them plainly, at a relevant moment, with the stakes kept low. The weirdness only arrives when an invitation pretends to be something else, or lands from nowhere with a calendar link attached.
Three rules keep it clean:
- Earn the moment. The invitation follows a real exchange: their comment, their reply, their problem surfacing in conversation. It never opens the relationship.
- Name their situation, never your services. "You mentioned the board's asking about retention. Want to talk it through? I have 20 minutes Thursday." The ask is about their world.
- Keep it small. Twenty minutes, no deck, no agenda beyond the thing they raised. Even booking a call is a bigger step than warm feels ready for, so make the ask low-risk and let the conversation grow from there.
Extend one of these a week and the practice compounds: some become calls now, and the rest learn that talking to you is easy, which pays off the quarter their problem lands.
What makes someone say yes to a first call?
Someone says yes to a first call when the conversation already feels started. Three ingredients do that work before you ever ask:
Familiarity
They've met your thinking somewhere: your posts, your newsletter, a room you spoke in, a colleague quoting you. By the time they book, the first call is warmer, easier, and closer to the goal.
Relevance
The invitation names something true about their quarter, so saying yes feels like progress on their problem, never a favor to you.
Low stakes
Twenty minutes with a peer, no pitch coming. People protect their calendars from salespeople and open them for useful conversations.
This is the two systems meeting in one moment: the marketing system built the familiarity, and the first move of a real sales process makes the ask easy to accept. When yeses come slow, the fix is upstream. Check which ingredient is thin, and build that one first.
Leah's take
"Once someone talks to me, they usually want to work with me. There just aren't enough of those conversations happening." I hear this from accomplished women constantly, and I want you to notice what it means: you built the hard half first. Most consultants can generate meetings long before they can lead one to a yes. You're standing on the rare skill, missing the common one, and the common one is very learnable.
So don't let anyone talk you into fixing what works. You don't need a new pitch, a rebrand, or a personality transplant. You need the seam: a marketing system that keeps the right people meeting your thinking, and the small, repeatable move of inviting warm people into conversations. That's the whole machine.
And protect your standard while you build it. Scarce calls make wrong-fit calls tempting, and a calendar full of the wrong conversations is just taking what happens to come your way with extra steps. Build the inputs, keep the bar, and let the great-on-calls part do what it does.
The Academy is where I teach both systems, with a room of women doing the same work.
