Offerings) are full-fledged clients, meaning they count towards your subscription plan.

At first blush, many coaches find this a peevish fact, as in:

The answer to that affords the possibility of having discovery calls be more likely to convert a prospect into a paying client.

First, regarding added cost, you'll only ever "pay" for a prospect in this way if they both:

1. happen to be enough to tip you into a higher subscription plan and
2. are still active whenever your billing date comes around.

If you bound the number of days out that someone is allowed to schedule a discovery call with you (which is a good idea, because interest and momentum can--and do tend to--drastically fade if it's more than a week separating when they got excited to talk with you and actually get to), they'll be in as an active client for only a fraction of the month, making it likely you'll be able to deactivate them prior to your next monthly billing date.

Now here's where things get interesting in ways that commodity scheduling systems cannot: by being a full-fledged client in your account in the lead-up to your discovery call (and optionally after), you can give prospects a real taste of what it will be like to work with you, including:

• your buttoned-up, professional style,
• your materials and content,
• the sort of work you do with people,
• the ways in which they'll be participating and supported in doing the work, and
• the sorts of results and measurables you deal in.

All of this sets the stage for a much richer discovery call that can make the opportunity of working with you far more compelling.

This is great, but many coaches who read this will be naturally left wondering, "How?"

For that, the webinar titled "Wowing Prospects into Clients" breaks down the whole thing.

You can find it, including the show notes and timestamps for the various highlights here:

If you're in a hurry and don't care about that window dressing, you can simply watch it here:

(If you're curious about how the cost of "mere prospects" shakes out, I cover that starting at 37:55. There is a spreadsheet you can see and play with for the exact numbers, downloadable here.)

Even given the foregoing, some coaches might cynically assume that charging for mere prospects is a ploy to juice CoachAccountable subscription revenues.

Sigh.  It's not.

Let me now talk to you not as the CA Knowledge Base but as John Larson, the guy who made CA.

The math in that spreadsheet reveal an average cost of under $2 per prospect that you book with CA in this way. The math of CA's subscription pricing is that an actual paying client who sticks around is worth at least $4/month.

So taken even with the most cynical eye, what CA is REALLY out to do is juice your number of clients who become actual paying customers and stick around.

Which makes our interests nicely aligned.

Now then, that blunt cost-benefit analysis:

• Using CA to schedule your prospects?  Call it the high end, $2.
• The time you'll likely spend on a discovery call?  Call it 1 hour, including whatever prep work and post activities.
• The value of your time?  You tell me, but let's assume $50, which is probably short-changing you.
• The value of a prospect becoming a paying customer?  Hundreds of dollars.
• The percentage of discovery calls you generally convert to paying clients?  Call it X%, you'll need to look for yourself on this.

CA's proposition to you, as more than a commodity scheduler, is to give some non-trivial lift in that X% (that is your conversion rate), and do so by allowing your prospective client to experience more than just getting a calendar invite prior to talking with you.

Even we consider only the value of your time in doing those discovery calls, you don't need much lift to make CA for scheduling your prospects a financial no-brainer, and that's not even counting the revenue that comes from having won a client you otherwise wouldn't have.

Why do I structure CA this way, and not create a scheduler component of the app that handles scheduling for prospects without making them full-fledged clients in your account?

I'm interested in giving you the BEST SHOT at having your prospects be delighted to become your paying customers: