How to Get Others to Adopt Asynchronous Voice Communication

"I know an async conversation will happen faster and save us time, but how do I tactically get the other person to do it?"

This was one of the key questions we tackled in our recent webinar with coaches Ari Meisel and Phil Drinkwater. You understand the benefits—faster responses, fewer meetings, more flexibility for everyone. But knowing async voice is better and actually getting people to use it are two very different challenges.

The good news? There are proven tactics that work, whether you're a coach trying to get clients on board or a team leader looking to transform how your organization communicates.

Why People Want to Make the Switch

People who become regular users of async voice communication swear by it, because they know it allows them to scale and be faster to get to answers. The conversations happen in less total time, but also sooner calendar time. It gives freedom to both sides to talk back and forth quickly, and it greatly reduces the number of meetings.

So there's a strong incentive to make the switch—but the challenge is often how to get someone to try something new in the first place.

Three Proven Tactics

How to Scale Your Coaching Practice with Async Coaching

The tactics we discussed are:

1. Lead with Confidence

It starts with having confidence and understanding that this ask is a benefit to both parties. You're not asking for a favor—you're offering something valuable.  You have this massive breakthrough in productivity, don’t you owe it to this other person to help them learn this new way too?

2. Use Your Leverage When You Have It

In situations where you have a power dynamic, you can simply refuse traditional methods. This is something Ari does in his business. Since he's highly sought after and values his time, he simply says: "In order to talk with me, start here."  He’s made it easy, go to https://talktoari.com.

In my case, I explain that every sales person who reaches out to me on LinkedIn, I give them my link so they can pitch me that way. It’s fewer calls and I’ve learned about a lot of products I otherwise would have ignored.

Consistently, he finds that people, even ones that say they aren’t very tech forward, do their first message and then are comfortable almost immediately.

3. Frame It as an Option When You Don't Have Leverage

We also talked about situations where the power dynamic means you really want to make it easy for the other person. In that case, frame it as an option where the value is explicit in the option:

"Happy to jump on a call—here's when I'm available. Or if you want to avoid a call, you can message me here (https://cv.chat/travis), and we can get talking right away."

In practice, this shows the immediate tradeoff: scheduling a meeting usually takes days, if not weeks, depending on each party's availability, whereas an async discussion can happen immediately.

In each of these, we observed that the first thing someone often says is “Ok, I’m here, now what? Should we coordinate the call through this?”  The magic here is to just ask a question to start the discussion and as soon as people are reacting to questions they fall into the groove.

Start Small with Close Collaborators

Another approach for people you work with closely is to convince them to try it around moments or types of discussions that are frequent but often feel like overkill for a meeting.

Examples include:

• Quick daily updates

• Post-sales meeting summaries

• Quick questions

• And more…

These three types of interactions quickly get people seeing the value where information is shared faster, doesn’t disrupt flow the way a call would, and still allows asking follow-up questions.  It naturally flows into asking more questions and creating more conversations to avoid calls and meetings.

An easy path there is to just create a Workspace for your Team and add them by email.

The Bottom Line

The key is understanding that you're not asking people to do something harder—you're offering them something that will save time and create more flexibility for everyone involved. Once people experience that benefit firsthand, the adoption becomes natural.