Dana Derricks runs FollowUp.com, a company whose entire product is helping other businesses respond to leads faster. Speed-to-lead is what they sell. And until recently, their best response time was about an hour.
Then they put Chloe, Close’s new AI voice teammate, in front of their inbound funnel. Everything changed.
Dana set up a Workflow that triggered a Chloe phone call to his inbound leads the moment they submitted a form.
Now, Dana says: “Our speed-to-lead went from an average of an hour down to one minute. So that’s sort of unbeatable. [...] My mind is still unraveling at the opportunity here.”
If you run a business like Dana’s — a.k.a. you need to be fast in order to win, but don’t have enough human reps to pull it off — here’s how to use Chloe to collapse your response time.
Why Manual Effort Alone Can’t Hit This Number
Covering one-minute response time around the clock means three shifts a day, seven days a week. You’d need at least half a dozen people on a rotation. For a small business, that’s an entire payroll line item dedicated to picking up the phone. Not selling, not closing — just dialing, answering, and qualifying.
For most small teams, this just isn’t possible. But with an always-on AI voice sales workflow, you can reach out to your hand-raisers when their interest is highest — and before they can navigate away from your site to check out other options.
The Three-Part Method
Here’s one example of how to build this Workflow in Close. Three pieces, all native to the product, no engineering required.
1. Build a Form to Capture the Lead
Start with the front door: a Close Form on your demo page. When someone fills it out, their info lands in your CRM as a new lead. No Zapier in the middle, no sync delay. The lead just shows up, ready to be worked.
How to set it up: Publish a form in Close and just copy the form embed code onto your demo request page, contact page, or landing page. From this point on, every submission lands in Close as a structured lead within seconds.
2. Build a Workflow Triggered by the Form
Workflows are Close’s automation engine. A Workflow is Close's way of saying "when X happens, do Y."
In this case, X is the form submission, and Y is whatever you want to happen next.
Set a Form submission as the trigger to kick off the Workflow and then add whatever actions your sales motion needs:
- Assign the new lead to a specific rep (or randomly assign a rep)
- Send a confirmation email
- Send a booking link via SMS text
- Have a human call back within a specific time frame
- Have Chloe call the lead the instant the Workflow is triggered
To fully get your speed-to-lead down to under one minute like Dana Derricks, you’ll want to add that last action to your Workflow: a Chloe call.
How to set it up: In Close, create a new Workflow, set a Form submission as the trigger.
3. Add a Call Step Assigned to Chloe
When we say “speed-to-lead” what we really mean is “speed-to-conversation.”
We don’t mean sending your inbound leads an automated confirmation email that says, “Thanks for your submission. Someone will reach out within 48 business hours.” That’s not a conversation — that’s just a receipt. It’s not moving people down your funnel.
Conversations move deals forward. But it’s nearly impossible to have enough humans available to jump on the phones to have those conversations at the perfect time.
Chloe is the lever that makes one-minute callback time physically possible — because, as Dana Derricks says, “Chloe can dial around the clock. Humans can't always do that.”
How to set it up: Add a call step to your Workflow to assign it to Chloe.
Remember: the goal here is not to get Chloe to close the deal on the call, but to contact your hand-raisers the moment they express interest.
Chloe can handle qualification and discovery, answer questions about your business, and book a meeting with your human closers.
She’s trained on your sales process, so she knows exactly how to navigate conversations with your leads — and when she’s done, the entire call is recorded and transcribed in Close for you to review so there’s no guessing about how the call went.
Speed-to-Lead Isn’t Always About Hustle
What Dana figured out at FollowUp.com is that the gap between a one-hour response and a one-minute response can’t be closed by working harder. He didn’t fix it by hiring more people, building a 24/7 SDR rotation, or running his team into the ground. He built a system where a human doesn’t have to be the one picking up the phone.
If you’re losing inbound deals to faster competitors, the fix isn’t a new motivational framework for your team. It’s a Form, a Workflow, and Chloe.
Start a free 14-day trial of Close and build it yourself. Your next 11pm inbound lead won’t go cold.
