GNT #182: Phone a friend first

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I almost didn't answer a friend's call last week. I was at my desk and I didn't recognize the number. I answered ready to politely spar, because I assumed it was spam.

It was a friend calling with questions about Meta ads. Whether he needed a Business Manager account or just a page, and whether you can target a job posting to specific zip codes.

I don't do Meta ads. I have good folks I refer people to for the click-by-click support. If you want somebody to sit in the ad account with you, it isn't me.

He knew that. He called me anyway, because I'm his phone a friend for marketing, and he wanted somebody to look at the whole thing with him before he spent any money.

Today I want to make the case for calling first, before you spend real money or time on something. Most of us call last, after we've read everything and narrowed it down to two options. By then we're just asking somebody to vote between two we already picked, and we miss the question that would have changed what we were doing.

Let's get to it.

What a person does that a search or AI can't

I bet my friend could have found his zip code answer in four minutes. Somebody probably made a video about it. I'm sure any AI tool would have had an answer. And if a fact is what you need, that's exactly what you should do.

A search gives you exactly what you asked for. That's the design, and it will never do more than that.

But it won't work upstream. What I needed to give him was the part that comes before the ad account. Whether an ad is even the right way to find this person. Who he's actually trying to reach and whether they're anywhere near him. What the post has to say to make the right person stop and read it.

If you get those wrong, the targeting doesn't even matter. You've just paid to put the wrong post in front of the wrong people, efficiently.

He hung up without his zip code answer. But what he had instead was the one thing he needed to go settle with his team before he spent a dollar on any of it.

Why we call last

Because calling your phone a friend with a narrowed-down question feels more competent than calling with a mess of thoughts.

So we do all the reading first. We come to our own conclusions and rule things out. We arrive with two options, ask which one, and it feels like we've done our homework.

A narrowed question asks for a yes/no

Your friend hears that you've already decided. You're not really asking outside of your specific question anymore, you're checking. So they check your work like you asked, instead of questioning it.

The call is pleasant, everyone agrees, and you hang up with exactly what you walked in with.

Takeaway

Whoever you'd call at the end of this, call them now instead.

Sure, learn enough to have a real conversation. Stop before you've decided.

Bring them the mess. Not the tidy version with the options already down to two.

And if they ask you something you can't answer yet, you called at exactly the right time. 

I'm always rooting for you. See you next week.

-Colleen

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