Chapter 09Never leave without the next call

The debrief gets booked inside the taping. Five minutes before the end, or the second the stream stops, I ask for fifteen minutes later in the week, I put it on the calendar while the guest is still glowing, and I ask whether their partner should join. If you remember one sentence from this part of the book, make it this one, which I said to my own team in September:

good salespeople never leave a call without the next call being in the books. Never. So my thinking is, is the debrief is like a bit of an excuse.

An excuse, and a true one. That's the whole design.

Most people treat a follow-up call as a courtesy. I rank the debrief with the pre-interview, and some weeks above it:

And I think debrief is as important, if not more important than pre-interview.

What follows is how I ask and who else I put on the invite.

Five minutes before

The taping is ending. The guest just told their story for twenty minutes to an audience, they feel good, and they're about to say thanks and leave. This is the most generous mood they'll be in all week. Here's what I do with it:

I do the interview, finish the interview, keep an eye on the clock. 5 minutes before, zoom out. First question, hey, can we book a debrief? What? Yeah, debrief. I'm going to create shorts. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. I want to send you all that and make sure your the thumbnail looks good. Your hair looks good. Can we do a debrief? Pull up the calendar. Okay, fifteen minutes, three days from now. Book it. But now it's. Book, meaning he's not getting away from me.

First question. Before any small talk about how it went, before any pitch, before goodbye. The order matters because the energy drops fast once the stream ends. Ask while they're still lit up and the yes comes easy:

And everybody's like, oh yeah, of course, of course. And they're excited cuz they just finished the stream.

Notice the line I use to open. On a call with my team I described it word for word:

great job. Stream was awesome. I'm not pitching. Can we book our debrief? I pull out my calendar again. Debrief is book.

Praise, then the ask, then the calendar on screen. Three moves, under thirty seconds.

The excuse has to be true

Why would a guest give you another fifteen minutes? Because you're about to give them more. After a taping my team and I cut shorts, design a thumbnail, build an episode page on my site and post the interview across platforms. All of it is for them, and all of it can go wrong in small ways, like a wrong title, a bad frame or a typo in their company name. The debrief is where they see it before the world does:

And the debrief, I have a bunch of excuses. Hey, I'm going to create shorts. I'm going to put it on our website. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that, so I'm gonna, I wanna run it by you, the thumbnail, make sure it looks good. Oh yeah, of course, of course. Okay, boom, it's booked.

I call it an excuse, but I'm careful about the word. It's a reason with a second purpose, and both purposes are real:

I say, oh, I have, it's not lying, it's true

This is the line you can't fake. If you don't make the shorts and the episode page, don't promise them. Find the true thing you'll make for the guest, make it, and that's your reason. A founder can smell a pretext. They can't argue with their own thumbnail.

Book it on the call

The booking happens live, with the calendar shared on screen. A link in a follow-up email is the weak version. People mean to click it and don't. The strong version takes thirty seconds while you're both still on:

As soon as it ends, I go into screen sharing mode again. And I book the debrief so they're not getting away.

Keep it small: ten or fifteen minutes, two or three days out or the same time next week. Small is what makes the yes automatic:

It'll be 10 minutes. Do you mind if I just book it right now? Next week, same time, 10 minutes. Is that good? Yeah, yeah, sure. Why not?

If the guest is traveling or slammed, push it out instead of losing it. I've told guests we can do it two weeks out. A debrief two weeks away is still a meeting. A "let's find a time" is nothing.

Then the pitch, lightly

With the debrief in the books, the pressure is gone. They're coming back regardless, so I can afford to bring up the business again without it feeling like a close. In the pre-interview I planted the seed. Now I check on it:

And then I go for the pitch again. Hey, remember I told you last week about what Charles and I do? Any questions about it?

And I always give them a way out:

Did any of that hit? Like, is it interesting or not really? So I'll give them an out as well, not really or whatever.

The out matters. It tells them this isn't a trap, so the yes, when it comes, is a real one. And even when the answer is "not really", I've gained something. By the time we sit down for the debrief, my business is familiar to them:

And then by the time you go to the debrief, they've heard the story twice. They're not like, oh, what the hell is going on here?

The full conversation about what we do belongs to the debrief itself, and that's the next chapter.

Invite the partner

Here's the part that took me longest to learn. Most of my deals weren't dying on the first founder. They were dying on the second one. I have an AI that listens to my calls, and I asked it once where I was getting stuck:

And it tells me, Sunny, right now the second partner, like the second founder, is your biggest hurdle.

It was right. I'd convince the person on the show and they'd go home excited. Then the co-founder who never met me would say no over dinner. So now the debrief invite goes to both. I set it up during the taping itself, with a question about their co-founder, and then I use it at the end:

You mentioned you'd be bringing it up with your business partner. Did you get a chance to do that? No. Can we invite him to the debrief?

Like I literally ask him, hey, what's your partner's email? Let me add him to the Calendly.

I tried a different version first, and it's worth knowing why it failed. My first idea was to invite the second partner onto the show too. Sometimes it worked. Often it didn't:

I found that one partner tends to be the forward front-facing and the other guy tends to be a bit more introverted. So it actually it doesn't always work.

The quiet partner doesn't want a camera. A short call to look at their company's episode is a much smaller ask. They come because their partner is proud of the interview, and now both decision makers are on the same call, hearing the same thing, at the same time.

The infinite game

The debrief is one instance of a bigger rule. Every meeting ends with the next meeting on the calendar, whatever happened in it:

I play what they call the infinite game. Okay, so I, my thinking is if there's even like a tiny bit of interest, I will never leave the meeting without having the next one already in my calendar.

The payoff can take months. In June I told my team about a founder I had interviewed six weeks earlier. The debrief went fine and the timing was wrong:

One of the guys I interviewed him a month and a half ago had a follow-up debrief planted the seed. Oh, this is not the right time.

Then he raised his round, and the relationship was still warm because we had never let it go cold:

Now he's got money. And then he says, let's get another call. And then today we had a meeting with all his team members.

He came back to me. I didn't have to chase him, because the debrief had already done the work of making me someone he knew.

The rule covers the meetings that go nowhere today too. If there's no fit right now, I don't send them off with "let's stay in touch". I put a date on it:

Can I, I'll just throw it in 6 months from now on the calendar. We'll do a sync.

And when I click with someone, the excuse writes itself:

hey, I only got through half my questions. Let's do another episode in a month from now or 2 weeks.

Over time I moved the debrief ask earlier and earlier. Now I sometimes book it before the taping even starts, during the five minutes we spend settling in. The reason and the ten minutes stay the same. Once it's booked I stop worrying about it:

So like it's very easy to get them to say yes, but that's already landing. So, so that then I don't stress about it anymore.

Pick the timing that suits you. The rule doesn't move. Nobody leaves without the next call in the books.

Try this week

Add the debrief ask to the last five minutes of your run of show and say it the same way every time. Here's the script, built from the lines above:

1. Watch the clock. With five minutes left, or the moment the stream stops, say: "Great job. That was awesome. Can we book a debrief?" 2. Give the true reason in one breath: "I'm going to make shorts, an episode page and a thumbnail, and I want to run it all by you before it goes out." 3. Share your calendar on screen. Offer ten or fifteen minutes, two or three days out, or the same time next week. Book it while they're on the call. 4. Ask about the partner: "You mentioned your co-founder. Should we invite them too? What's their email?" Add them to the invite before you hang up. 5. Bring up the business in two sentences: "Remember what I told you about what we do? Did any of it hit, or not really?" Take whatever answer comes. The full conversation is for the debrief. 6. If they can't do this week, book two weeks out. If there's no fit at all, book a check-in six months out.

Then make the reason true. Before the debrief, send them the episode page, the shorts and the thumbnail. Walk in with something to show.

Count the calls you had last week. How many of them ended with the next one already on the calendar?