The Truth About Book-a-Call Funnels (No One Talks About This)

Book-a-call funnels are everywhere, promising to fill your calendar with paying clients. But before you spend another dollar on ads, let’s break down what they really entail, who they work for, and when you’re better off focusing elsewhere. In this episode, I walk you through the hidden fees (both in money and time), how pricing plays a crucial role, and three alternatives to consider if you’re not quite ready for a full-on automated discovery-call machine.

Topics Covered In This Episode:

1. Book-a-Call Funnels Require Deep Pockets & System: Unless you’re charging $3K–$5K+ per month, ad costs will eat your profits. Make sure you can onboard new clients seamlessly.
2. Cold Traffic = More Discovery Calls, More No-Shows, & More Time Spent: If your sales process isn’t “conversion-optimized,” you’ll end up doing more calls that don’t convert.
3. You Need High-Quality Assets & Pre-Selling: Testimonials, case studies, and a strong nurture sequence are non-negotiable. Without those, cold ads turn into a leak where leads slip through.
4. Evaluate Your Capacity Before You Scale: If you can’t handle 5–10 new clients next month without breaking your fulfillment, hold off on the funnel. Overpromising leads to underdelivering.
5. Three Alternatives to Generate High-Paying Clients Right Now: Paid speaking inside established communities, guest podcasting, and leveraging warm list

Find the full show notes at:  https://brandimowles.com/255

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Transcript

Ep 255: The Truth About Book-a-Call Funnels (No One Talks About This)

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Brandi: [00:00:00] Everyone's talking about book of call funnels, like they're the holy grail of landing clients, but are they really, are they actually all that they're cracked up to be? Today we're diving into whether or not this strategy actually works, and for who. If you've thought about setting up one or spent time on discovery calls, that went nowhere.

This one's for you. By the end of the episode, you'll know exactly if a book of call funnel is right for you and what to do instead if it's not. So let's jump on in.

Welcome back to another episode of the Serve Scale Soar podcast. My name is Brandi Mowles,

and I am your host. And today we're diving into book a call funnels after 255 episodes. I can't believe I haven't had this discussion yet.

And it's not because I'm totally [00:01:00] against book of call funnels or it's not because I'm trying to gate keep anything. I actually have a book of call funnel in my business and one thing that I'm gonna talk about today is I just want people to make a decision that is right for them and where they are in their business.

Because in the online space there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of plug this one thing in your business and everything will get solved. When there are promises like that, we don't always look at the fine print details. People like to leave out the fine print details of what that actually looks like, what that entails, and so book of call funnels have been popping up.

There's so many ad programs out there that are teaching book of call funnels. Spoiler alert, I don't teach book of call funnels and conversions for clients. And that's because I truly believe that nine outta 10 people, they're not right for, you're not ready for them yet in your business. Now, there are 10% of people out of that, that they may be right [00:02:00] for.

And what you need to know is the fine print, all the details that go into it and how they're not this. Saving Holy Grail, automated client getting machine that they're so portrayed as. So in this episode, I wanna break down and cut through all the noise and show you who's it for, who it's not, so you can make the right informed decision for you.

Isn't it the dream to have automated clients, like clients just booking you all the time? You look at your calendar and your calendar's full of discovery calls, and my question for you is. If you woke up and your calendar was full of discovery calls, would you be able to handle that? Could you onboard five clients, 10 clients successfully in the next five days, or would that break every system that you already have?

Do you know how much a client is worth to you? These are all questions that we have to get real with ourselves and step into our business owner hat and ask ourself these [00:03:00] questions before we start ever running a book, a call funnel, but we hear it all the time. Set up a call funnel and the clients will come.

Maybe you've put up a landing page, a work with me page, and you've ran $500 in ads to it, and you're like, yes, this is it. This is gonna be the thing. So I don't have to do those marketing minutes that Brandy is always talk about, this is what the pros do, but not so fast. Let's slow down for a second and define what a book a call funnel is and who it's built for.

So a book, a call funnel is not one of those things that you can build it and they will come type of things, nor is anything in life. But just because you have a work with me page, a sales page there's a book, A call, funnel page doesn't mean that people are gonna come. There has to be an element of page traffic to it.

So usually that page. Or that traffic is paid traffic, it can be organic, but for most service providers, you don't have the audience [00:04:00] size for organic to work. You don't have the email list for that to work, so you're gonna have to move to paid traffic. So we are sending paid traffic to a page. Hopefully we have a really nice design page, and on that page will be either a call to action to go in and book the call right then, or there'll be an application that's followed by a book, a call.

So just if you were booking one-on-one clients organically and we send them to our Work With Me page, our application page, it's the same thing. This one's just optimized for cold traffic, which is a harder sale. We, if you run ads, running anything to cold traffic. There needs to be an element of warming up, but in this case, that is who we're sending people to.

These call funnels work really well for super high ticket agencies, for coaches that are working one-on-one with high ticket and people who have a really warm audience.

They're usually positioned as the next steps. And so maybe someone [00:05:00] has bought something from like for us, conversions for clients, and then they're ready to take the next step in growing their business. So they apply for strategist society, or there's health coaches that maybe someone buys their macro one-on-one.

1 0 1 and now they want one-on-one coaching, so they send 'em to that. It's usually the next step. There's usually something beforehand that warms them up. A webinar even can warm someone up before you send this to this. However, when service providers are running these, typically they're taking cold audience directly to this application page and they're wondering why it's not working.

So now that we know a book, a call funnel is traffic leading to the application page, and then we either have book a call right there or an application that leads to your calendar page. Then we're gonna book a call, a discovery call, a sales call, and we're gonna hold the call. And then

our goal is to get the booking, so then it looks like also playing the [00:06:00] numbers. How many people are landing on your page? Great. If 2% of those people then book a call. That's awesome. That means if you have a hundred people land on that page, two people will book a call, and if you're really, really good, 50%.

Will then become a client, so you'd have one new client. So that's how that works in terms of the whole funnel flow.

Now, here's where most service providers are giving, getting it all wrong, your pricing, this is the number one thing I see. Your pricing doesn't match the model. When you're only charging 500, a thousand, 1500, even 2000 I would say the minimum really for a book of call funnel to be very, very profitable, would be 3000.

So anything under 3000, you're not at a price point that even allows you to be super profitable or worth it. So I had a sales call with someone and they were telling me they were just, they wanted this automated process for landing clients and that [00:07:00] she had went through a program and they taught book of call funnels, but she wasn't getting the results that they had promised.

And I said what are your prices? And she was at 1500 a month. And I said, that's not even enough to make it worth it because on average you're probably gonna pay about a thousand dollars per client. And if that client only stayed with her one month, she only made $500 off that. And so when we look at this, we have to make sure.

That we are at a profitable price point where it makes sense for us to pay that. And we have to realize that it's not just this automated process. You're gonna have to spend time on more discovery calls with people who aren't gonna hire you, which if you're not doing a 15, 20 minute discovery call, like I teach butcher discovery calls going for hours.

Let's say you have five discovery calls a week in only one book. Because you are gonna have a lower booking rate than if you were bringing these people in through your normal [00:08:00] process with marketing minutes. So let's say you're doing five discovery calls. Your discovery calls are an hour, that's five hours, and you may book one, plus you've already spent X amount of money trying to land those.

So it can also be a time and energy drain, especially if you're someone who doesn't love sales calls or discovery calls, and there will be a higher. No show rate, it's just the out of every five bookings, you may have one or two that canceled. There's things that we can put in place to optimize, so that doesn't happen.

But that is the reality of when you're sending cold traffic to an application page, you are gonna have a higher no show rate. It's built for a different business model. This isn't really the business model that most of you have. If you have a large agency that's charging five, six, $10,000 a month, you have a sales team that's doing setting social selling.

And your sales calls, it works. If you're a coach that has a webinar or [00:09:00] something like that in front of it, they can work for most one-on-one service providers. You're not in a position or have the tools or resources for these book of call funnels to work.

And then there is gonna be more of an element of you having to really lean into a convincing standpoint instead of a converting standpoint. So these people don't know you. They weren't referred to you. They're coming straight from cold traffic, which can be a little funny anyway. And so you're gonna have to spend more time with them.

On these calls, it's not probably gonna be a 15 or 20 minute call. You're gonna have to do more heavy lifting than on a traditional sales call.

So if you are at any of these where you're like, Ugh, I don't love doing sales calls. I am undercharging. I'm not charging at least $3,000 per month per client. If I added five clients in the next month, my business would break then this probably isn't the right marketing move for you right now.

It doesn't mean it won't. In a [00:10:00] month, two, three months, things can change, but right now it's probably not the best marketing move for you, even though it feels so sexy and it's positioned that way. It's sold that way, like you're just gonna have clients lining up to work with you. That's probably not gonna happen right off the bat.

They take time to finesse and work with, just like any funnel does. Okay, so when is a book a call funnel? When does it actually make sense for your business? I. There's a time and place for them and they can be great, but they're not great if you're just getting started. One, we really wanna be at three, four, ideally $5,000 per month, especially like that's where we wanna be is at that $5,000 a month.

That's when it starts to make sense from a financial standpoint.

When you are so booked out with client work and you're starting to hire some people to take on, and so now you have a team that you need to support and you need to have more calls coming in to be able to feel that that's it. And [00:11:00] you have systems in place where you could onboard five new people this month and it not break, then it makes sense.

When you have strong assets to do a lot of the pre-selling, so maybe you have on the application you have a webinar that they can watch, maybe you have tons of social proof and tons of testimonials, and you have a super strong nurture sequence that can really sell people into it, then it works. It's just like a anything else, other funnels, a webinar with someone who's really good at selling can sell any price point, but they also need all the assets they need.

Strong nurture sequences. They need a strong sales page. They need strong, be able to close calls strong. They need to have all these assets in place in order for the funnel to work. It's the same thing with your book, A Call funnel. You need to have strong assets in place. That means you need to be a master at sales calls.

You need to be a master at nurturing. You need to be a master at upselling and keeping clients long. Term for this to make sense. If you have [00:12:00] all that in place, then yes, maybe it's time to look into this. And especially if you're trying to grow an agency. I will tell you in Strategist Society, we have people charging $5,000 per month totally booked out.

They are not doing this because it doesn't make sense for where they're going with their business. So you can still have a highly successful business without ever having to book a call funnel or running ads to your services.

So if you heard all this and you're like, okay, Brandy, I have all that. I wanna grow an agency, then yes, let's do a book, a call funnel. But if you're not ready for that and you're like, oh man, I'm not priced there yet. Or that doesn't sound like something I wanna go into. Here's what you can do instead. One is you can pick one marketing method and you go in on it for 90 days.

I don't care what it is, just remember, it's where your ideal client is and there are gonna be places that are better for landing higher paid clients. So if you're ready to step into that strategist, say, or really step into landing higher paid clients,

there [00:13:00] are three suggestions I'll give you. We have tons of them in Strategist Society, but I wanna give you three that come up a lot when I'm working with my Strategist Society members. One, you get in the room with those people, so that usually means that you're paying to be in a higher level program with people who are gonna need you.

So group coaching programs, masterminds that have that type of client in it. Two, you start pitching yourself and being on podcast. And three, you go and be a guest expert speaking that can be in person or virtually with the rooms that your ideal clients are in. Doesn't mean they're the biggest rooms, but they're the rooms where your ideal client are hanging out with.

So those are three ways you can start attracting higher level clients without using a book, a call funnel. So to wrap this party up book a call funnels aren't a bad thing, but for most one-on-one service providers, they're not the best first move, and they may not even then be the best fifth move. You may or may not ever want one of [00:14:00] these in your business, or you may get to a point where you're like, yes, I'm ready to do the dang thing, and step into this next level.

And now you'll know exactly what you need in place in order to make it work.

And if you are at that place where you're doing three, four, $5,000 per month and you want more support on, how do you step in that strategist there? How do I get my business to the next level? Those $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 months? And you wanna customize non cookie cutter approach? Go on and go to the strategist society.com and apply to work with me one-on-one and in our mentorship program where you'll be in a community with other women doing 10, 20, $30,000 months.

None of them have a book of call funnel and they're still doing the dang thing. So go to the strategist society.com and you can check out my book of call Funnel 'cause that's exactly what that is. But it works, it's optimized and I don't run paid ads to it, but I have a platform. I have multiple platforms that I can send traffic [00:15:00] to and order without ever running ads to it.

So there's a difference with that as well. Okay, my friends. Until next time, go out, serve your clients, scale your business, and soar into the success you deserve.