Strong Sales Calls in 7 Steps: From First Hello to Yes

A lead fills in your form. Someone on your team calls an hour later, says "Hey, this is Sam from the company, how's it going?" and gets a polite brush-off. Another lead never picks up at all. By Friday, both are marked as not interested and the team is asking marketing for more leads.

Most businesses don't have a lead problem. They have a phone problem. The calls aren't fast enough, they stop too early and nobody knows what to say once the lead answers.

In this Business Systems Summit session, David Jenyns sits down with Chris Smith, co-founder of Curaytor and author of the USA Today bestseller The Conversion Code. Curaytor works with over 800 small businesses on their leads, ads and sales. It grew to over $12 million in annual sales within four years. Chris spent years in the cubicle dialling for dollars before that. Here he walks through the 7 steps of a sales call he uses to take a lead from hello to yes.

Sales Is a System, Not a Personality

Chris learned sales in a boiler room. His job was to phone people from all over the country who wanted to be famous and sell them a trip to a talent showcase. In his first week, the coach who ran the room grabbed a chalkboard and drew a simple graph: a buying line, with the cost of what you sell on one side.

The lesson was short. There's a science to sales. Your job is to get people more emotionally excited than the cost of what you sell, during the time you have their attention. Get them above that buying line and you can close. The same idea works for marketing: get people more excited than the cost of handing over their details, in the few seconds you have them, then capture them.

When Chris asked what he should actually do, living on his parents' couch and needing to make money, the coach told him he didn't need to know anything about the company or the product yet. He needed enthusiasm. On the phone there's no body language and no eye contact, so the energy in your voice has to carry everything. Chris quotes a business owner in his book who calls it the black lab mindset: be happy to see every lead, the way a dog goes crazy every time the doorbell rings.

Tone Matters More Than the Words

Chris's next sales job was in Dan Gilbert's boiler room at Quicken Loans, selling mortgages over the phone. The numbers there were brutally clear: 100 calls, five conversations, three credit pulls, two loans written, one loan closed. Once you're good at it and you know your numbers, sales comes down to enthusiasm and effort.

The lesson Chris never forgot from Gilbert was about tone. The often-quoted figure from psychologist Albert Mehrabian's research is that 55% of how we read each other comes from body language. Think about how you know a partner is annoyed with you before they say a word. When the phone takes that away, tone does the heavy lifting.

Hand the same script to two actors. One reads it and it's boring. The other wins an Oscar. The words were identical. So a script is only half the system. How your team delivers it is the other half.

Why Leads Are Harder to Convert Than Ever

Chris uses real estate to show how much the game has changed. In 2011, about 4.4 million homes sold in the United States and only 2.9 million real estate leads were generated. Every lead was close to a deal. The internet, Zillow, Facebook and landing pages were all newer. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Three years later there were over 40 million leads. At the time of the session it was over 80 million. Homes sold barely moved, from 4.4 million to 5.1 million. Today there are something like 82 nos before every yes. The buyers are still there, but finding them is a needle-in-a-haystack job. That's exactly why you need a system.

It also changes what a good result looks like. The average conversion rate on internet leads can sit at 1 or 2%. Nobody closes half their leads. But lift your conversion from 2% to 4% and your income doubles, without buying a single extra lead.

That's the money most businesses leave on the table. Plenty of owners earn $100,000 to $400,000 a year and are still what Chris calls accidental hundred thousandaires: one sick day or one lawsuit away from the house of cards falling over. The leaks aren't only in lead generation. They're on the call: the follow-up that came too late, stopped too soon or said the wrong thing.

Speed, Tenacity and Scripts: Get the Lead on the Phone

Once leads are coming in (referrals, internet leads, bought leads, whatever your source), Chris's team handles every one with STS: speed, tenacity and scripts. Do all three and you get the highest conversion rate possible. (If the leads aren't flowing yet, start with an automated lead generation system first.)

Speed: Think Like a Microwave

Chris spent a year researching his book and merging lead response data from several sources. The gap that matters isn't hours or days. It's minute five versus minute 30. Call within the first five minutes and your odds are 100 times better than if you call at the half-hour mark. (The best-known source for that figure is the Lead Response Management Study by Dr James Oldroyd with InsideSales.com.)

Plenty of businesses never get close. In the data Chris shared, 47% of leads were never responded to at all. The companies that did follow up took a median of over three hours.

So treat every new lead like ten seconds counting down on the microwave. Not ten minutes, not ten hours. And if you work alone, or you're in meetings and with clients all day, that's where an inside salesperson or automated messages that follow up while you can't become critical. The Sales Systems and AI masterclass looks at how AI can take on more of that work in your sales team.

Tenacity: Six Calls in Three Days

One call, even inside five minutes, reaches the lead about 48% of the time. Call six times in total and you can get to 93%. Chris's team spreads those calls over three days:

• Day one: three calls.
• Day two: two calls.
• Day three: one call.

Two tactics make those calls land. The first is the double dial. When nobody answers, don't leave a voicemail or send a text. Just call straight back. Most people ignore an unknown number once, but a second call right away makes them wonder if it's important. Chris says it lifts the answer rate by around 22 to 25%.

The second is bursting. Every lead gets calls, texts and emails, because sometimes the problem isn't the messenger or the message, it's the method. Chris has leads who ignored emails for two years and replied to a group text inside a minute. In the first week, double and triple down: six calls in the first three days and two or three emails in the first two or three days. As one quote in his book puts it, time destroys everything. Picture each lead decaying a little more every day you leave it.

Timing helps too. Calls between 8am and 10am and between 4pm and 6pm are the most likely to be answered, as people head to work or home before they get busy. Wednesdays and Thursdays tend to beat Mondays and Fridays. And if a lead still goes quiet after all of that, it isn't the end of the road. The guide to how to bring dead leads back to life picks up where this cadence stops.

Scripts: Know What to Say When They Answer

Speed and tenacity only set up the conversation. Chris wrote The Conversion Code because, after thousands of conferences, hundreds of webinars and dozens of sales books, he'd never heard anyone explain what to actually say to an internet lead when they pick up. Quicken Loans and the other companies he worked for had mastered it. The conversation is the only thing that creates the customer. It can be just as systematic as the follow-up.

The 7 Steps of a Sales Call

Chris calls this the perfect sales call: the steps that take a lead from saying hello to saying "Yes, I'll buy," or "Yes, come over and list my home." It's industry agnostic. He's used it to sell mortgages and vacations. Curaytor uses it to sell software, consulting and Facebook advertising. Its clients use it to sell houses.

His full script has more steps than this, including modules on digging deeper and building trust over the phone. In the session he walked through the beginning and the end of the call. Those are the seven steps below. For a longer, consultative take on the middle of the call, JV Crum III's 11 steps to consultative sales calls make a good companion.

Step 1: Do a Pre-Call Stalk

Chris calls this step zero. Before you pick up the phone, you have more information on a lead than ever before. To get them to like and trust you, you need to show them they're talking to the right person.

The worst opening in sales is "Hey, this is Chris calling from Curaytor. How's it going?" The lead isn't your friend and they get cold called all the time. Compare that with: "I got your details because you're thinking about hiring us. I looked at your Zillow profile. It looks like you sold 120 homes last year with a 4.9 out of five rating. How are you?"

A realtor following up a Zillow lead can do the same: "Hi, it's Judy. I saw you found a home on Zillow listed for $380,000 on Main Street, four beds and two baths. How's it going?" At Quicken Loans, callers opened with the street the lead lived on, their loan amount and their current interest rate. A couple of specific details breaks the ice and stops the call from ending with "It's not a good time," which is how half of calls end.

A practical tip: if you're researching someone with a common name, Google their email address instead. Chris showed that searching his name brings up around 300 million results, while searching his email cuts it to about 9,000, nearly all of them his bio, blog and social profiles. Better still, use a system so you're not googling every lead by hand. Some CRMs put this data into the lead alert. Calendar tools can pull work history, mutual connections and shared interests into every meeting. Chris's rule: if a meeting is at 2pm, do your pre-call stalk from 1:50.

Step 2: Nail the Perfect First Minute

Chris calls this P60. If your goal is to close someone on one call, you have to gain control at the start. Set the tone in the first minute that you're in charge and you'll still be in charge at the end.

The boiler room technique is simple. After the opening, ask the lead to grab a pen and paper: "Can you please grab a pen and paper? I'm going to share some information about our company that isn't on the internet. Let me know when you're ready."

That one request does two jobs. If they go and get it, you've told them what to do and they did it, so you're leading the conversation. And it qualifies them. Someone who isn't serious won't get up for a pen. When you might call 50 or 100 leads to find a good one, that's a valuable signal.

Two tips for making it work. Keep some information off your website so you have something worth writing down. And if you can't think of anything else, start with your own details: your name, email and phone number in case you get disconnected.

Step 3: Acknowledge, Respond and Pivot

Early in almost every call, the lead puts up a brick wall. "I just want to know what the rates are." "I'm a bit busy, can you just tell me how much it costs?" "I don't want to talk to anybody, I just want to know if the home's still for sale."

Chris's answer is ARP:

• Acknowledge. Say back what they said: "You just want to know how much Curaytor costs? Great question." On the phone, jumping straight to a reply feels abrupt.
• Respond, but not with the specific answer they asked for: "Curaytor is definitely not inexpensive. It's definitely not for everyone."
• Pivot back to what you need to talk about: "Are you an agent who works alone, or are you on a team?"

Giving them the number and hanging up isn't a conversation. You're not an order taker. Acknowledge the brick wall, respond to it and move the call somewhere useful.

Step 4: Pitch With Feature, Benefit and Tie-Down

Chris has met plenty of salespeople who network well, market well and get on with people, but are terrible at pitching and closing over the phone. The fix is a formula he writes as F + B + T = C: feature, plus benefit, plus tie-down, equals close.

Most people pitch feature after feature and then ask, "Will you buy?" Instead, pair each feature with what it means for this buyer, then check they agree:

• Feature: everything Curaytor builds works brilliantly on mobile.
• Benefit: more people now look at ads, websites and emails on their phone than on a desktop.
• Tie-down: "Do you find yourself looking at your phone as often as your computer these days?" "Yes."

A real estate agent who says "I'm with RE/MAX, nobody sells more real estate" has given a feature. The benefit to the seller is an agent who does this every day, won't get them sued and won't leave money on the table. The tie-down: "You don't want to work with a part-time realtor, right?"

Work out your four to six best features and build an FBT for each. Most people already know their features. They just never think through the benefit or the tie-down. Stacking FBTs means you're closing the whole way through the pitch, not once at the end, which is where so many salespeople get stuck. If your pitch itself needs tightening before you break it into FBTs, here's how to craft a business pitch that people remember.

Step 5: Say "Here's What Happens Next"

This is where good pitches fall apart. The salesperson knows it's time to finish, gets nervous and starts stammering about Visa or MasterCard. Chris's old sales coach had a line for it: lions don't ask lambs for food.

So don't finish with "So what do you think?" or "Do you want to buy?" After your third or fourth FBT, use a transition statement: "Okay, great. Well, here's what happens next." Chris shortens it to HWHN.

Then foreshadow the next steps as if they've already said yes. You might know it as assuming the sale. For a home seller: "Since you agree with all of that, I'm going to get a photographer to take pictures of your home, look up all the comps and get the sign ordered."

Step 6: Use a Trial Close

While you're laying out those next steps, slip in a question about the process rather than the decision: "When the photographer takes the pictures of your property, is it better for you during the week or on the weekend? During the day or early evening?"

That's your first real attempt to close. It isn't a yes or no question about working with you. If they answer "The weekend would be better," they've bought.

Step 7: Finish With a Slot Close

Now give them two last choices. "Perfect. Can I come over tomorrow at 2pm or 4pm to look at the condition of your home?"

Curaytor's version strings the last three steps together: "Sounds like you love our websites, our Facebook ads, our email marketing and our lead conversion. So here's what happens next. We'll build this out for you over three to five weeks, then we'll start your coaching. Would you prefer coaching on a Tuesday or a Thursday?" When they pick Thursday: "Great. Would you prefer to use a credit or debit card for the first payment?"

It's still a choice, just never a choice between yes and no. Chris's view is that this is how you help someone buy rather than selling them. Being meticulous, with the same steps and the right questions every time, does justice to both the lead and your business. For another proven approach to the end of the call, see how to close more business deals in three steps.

The Five Yes Technique

Chris wrapped up with one more tool that sits just before the pitch and the close: get five yeses in a row.

Play back what the lead has already told you. "Earlier you said this, right?" "Yeah." "When I asked about that, you mentioned this, right?" "Yeah." "And your goal with this was that, right?" "Yeah." Once they're in the habit of agreeing, move into your pitch.

Chris demonstrated it on the summit audience. Did you enjoy the session? Did you learn something about sales you didn't know? Did you like the research tip? It's a simple psychological nudge. People who keep saying yes tend to keep saying yes.

Make the Perfect Sales Call Your Team's Default

Chris credits a lot of his success to systems, scripts and standard operating procedures. He likes a line he heard in an interview: get rid of the SOBs and replace them with SOPs. What he's looking for are procedures that work every time, because when you reinvent the wheel while you're trying to grow, things start leaking.

That's the real lesson for an owner. Everything in this article can be written down: the five-minute response rule, the six-call cadence, the double dial, the pre-call stalk checklist, the first-minute opener, your ARP answers to the brick walls you hear every week, your four to six FBTs and your closing lines. Once it's documented, it stops depending on who happens to pick up the phone. Put it all together and you have a sales playbook any new hire can follow. It's also the foundation for systemised sales processes that lift results across the whole team.

Sales calls are one part of a bigger chain that runs from first enquiry to happy client. If you haven't mapped that chain yet, your Critical Client Flow is the place to start. The guide on how to book a sales meeting covers the follow-up that gets you in front of the lead in the first place.

As Chris puts it, there's no shortcut to growing your business: you need good tools, good people and good systems. Dave would add one thing. Great salespeople aren't born on the phone. They're built, one documented call at a time, until the perfect sales call is simply how your business sells.

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