Call First, Close First: How to Call Inbound Leads Faster

They say 90% of success is showing up. But if you ask me, that quote is incomplete.

Yes, you need to show up. But if you’re leading sales for your business, you also need to show up before the competition does.

Imagine a potential customer clicking around your website. They’re doing their research and checking out your prices. They fill out your inbound lead form and even provide their phone number. They’re officially interested.

But they’re also doing the same thing while browsing two or three other websites. 

If you’re asleep at the wheel and failing to reach out within a few minutes, it leaves space for the competition to “show up” instead. 

They place the first call, win the customer over, and by the time you notice the form submission, you’ve lost the lead.

If it sounds extreme, consider the stats. You’re 21 times as likely to qualify a lead if you respond within 5 minutes as opposed to responding within 30 minutes.

The instant you get a form response, the race is on. 

Someone from your sales team needs to be the first to get fresh leads on the phone. But have you ever considered what makes your company a faster responder? It takes more than a willingness to be quick. It takes smart strategies to make that happen. Here’s what you’ll need to know.

Before the Call: How to Prepare for Speed

How do you get faster? You stop doing the things that slow you down.

The writer Elbert Hubbard once reportedly said: “The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.” 

The same logic holds true when you receive a lead through a form submission on your website.

Your first instinct will be to try and make each call as perfect as possible. You’re going to want to prep—and prep and prep and prep—until before you know it, you’ve looked at the clock, and an hour’s gone by.

Take it from someone who’s done it: 90% of the people you call probably won’t answer the phone. So if you’re spending 20 minutes prepping for every call, it’s a really big waste of your time. 

That’s not to say you should do no prep. But limit your prep time to about a minute. You don’t need to do extensive research if the lead isn’t all that warm in the first place. You’ll just need some basic information before dialing:

• If you’re cold calling? Quickly check the lead’s LinkedIn profile or website. This introduces you to their company and role. I typically pull up LinkedIn information if I can’t find anything else.
• If you have a CRM, gather key information they filled out in your inbound lead form. Company details, job title, and any potential pain points. You’ll want to know these—and with a good CRM, they’re available at a glance. More on that in a minute.

The bottom line: there are benefits to calling sooner rather than later. Calling near-on immediately is even better, and here’s why.

If you wait 30 minutes to make the call, you’ll feel like you know the person better—but they don’t know you. This can turn a discovery call into something resembling an awkward sales call. 

On the other hand, if you call within 30 seconds, everything feels a bit warmer. The conversation is more organic. You can use your natural curiosity to find out their pain points. You might even read some of their questions back to them, making the call feel more like an organic back-and-forth.

If you’re leading a team of salespeople for your business, I’d recommend investing in power dialers and predictive dialers. These serve logistical purposes and increase your speed. 

But they also remind every sales rep: hey, you don’t have to overcomplicate this. Just make the call.

The Benefits of Increasing Your Speed to Call

Being the fastest person to call sounds like a race. Not everyone likes races. But hear me out, because there are serious benefits to this approach:

Leads feel like a speedy call means their inquiry is high-value. 

Ever wait in line for service? It’s not a good feeling. You feel more like a cog in a machine than a valued potential customer. 

The same is true online. 

If you make an inquiry to a company and only get a call the next day, you’ll feel like the company was busy doing other things. A faster call has an implicit subtext: this lead is really, really important to us. So important, in fact, we had to reach out right away.

Personalization eases the awkwardness of cold calls.

To make the call more personalized, you only need to use the basic information—their name, company, and pain point. 

So, when you lead your sales team, use these warm callbacks as one of your primary sources of sales. Every interaction will feel warmer than the classic cold call. You’ll have the customer’s attention right after they look at your website.

Calling quickly (within 102 minutes) reduces stress and increases success.

Don’t stress for 20 minutes about optimizing your call. Just get into the call right away. A quick 1-2 minutes of prep time is all you need. 

Even more importantly, you don’t want to lose the prospect’s attention while they’re still intrigued with your service. If they were just reading about you 2 minutes ago online, there’s no better time to call them than the present.

We’ve used this strategy here at Close. In fact, we like to call so fast that we often surprise our prospects.

Do you think that works against us? No; it makes us look like a professional team who values their interest.

Closing the Gap Between Inquiry and Call

All the above sounds great, but there’s one caveat: you still need the back-end technology to make faster calls happen.

I recommend integrating your inquiry forms with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, like Close. This way, new leads will appear almost instantly on your radar.

The biggest thing you can do as a sales team is shorten the distance between two points. You want to set it up so that once a customer fills out your form, all their information is automatically imported to your Close software.

Make sure you’re paying particular attention to:

• …the organization of your data. Your sales reps—or you—will need to instantly access key details from the form submission for a fast 1- or 2-minute prep time.
• …using Smart views within your CRM, which highlights any leads who have filled out a form but haven’t been contacted yet. You’ll be able to spot new leads at a glance.
• …highly personalizing your calls. Your form should include some personal information or pain point questions so you can reference these during a call. Once again, organize this data into Close.

That still leaves one question. How do you import this information into your CRM? With Close, you can create two types of automation sequences:

External sequences connect form submissions to Close CRM in real-time using a third-party resource like Zapier.

Internal Close workflows, such as triggering SMS and email follow-ups within Close.

‎You can use Close to send SMS or email notifications to you or your team, all while prepping the potential customer with an SMS about where to expect to receive a call. (This is nice because it makes your sales call feel less like a “cold call.” After all, it’s expected.)

What happens if you receive a lead at, say, 2 a.m. local time? The lead can receive your automated SMS/email follow-up and schedule a time. The key is ensuring leads set up a time while they’re still interested.

You want to avoid leads feeling like you’ve left them on “read.” If they schedule a time to talk to you, they can still be warm leads by the time they’re ready for the phone meeting.

How to Overcome Your Hesitation in Making Sales Calls

The biggest challenge for increasing speed-to-call isn’t the technology. Close can help with that. The biggest challenge is overcoming your teams’ tendency to procrastinate.

I’m not blaming you. Most people have the procrastination instinct: they want to optimize, perfect their approach, and increase the odds of success. 

But they fail to realize that the longer they wait, the worse their odds are getting.

If you have anyone on your sales team who loves doing these calls, they’re probably great sales reps already. But they’re outliers. Most people don’t enjoy these types of calls. Your instinct is going to be to deprioritize the speed of making them.

You might even catch yourself thinking: “What’s the point?”

One potential way to overcome this is to hire dedicated sales reps who enjoy these calls and don’t mind pouncing on new leads. These are the people who understand the importance of placing calls right away.

And if you don’t enjoy them, don’t fret. Simply outsource to someone who does. Or start practicing your calls to make them seem less scary.

If you’re leading a sales team and they don’t sound enthusiastic about your priority of speed-to-call, do some convincing. Tell them the stat I shared at the beginning of this article. Show them what you’ve done to set up the automatic imports into Close. 

Once your team understands how important the speed of these calls is, they might start finding it—dare I say it?—fun.

How to Open a Call Effectively

You’ve made the call, the phone is ringing, and then you realize something’s missing:

You have no idea what you’re going to say.

Simplicity works best—especially if you want to prioritize speed. There’s no need for “fancy” opening lines here, no need for cool sales tricks you found from TikTok stars who have fantastic opening lines. I’ve never been one to have a “killer” opening line ready to go. 

My approach is, instead, to be as human as possible. Here’s a glimpse into my process:

• I introduce myself
• I may make a little chit-chat, as long as it stops feeling like a “cold call” and more like a human-to-human interaction.
• I keep things simple and friendly. I’m never trying to run the customer through a prepared script—which might sound fast, but isn’t effective.
• I get right to the key questions. Do they have a budget? Are they a good fit? Do they know what my product does?

You don’t have to be a “wizard” on the phone. You don’t need an elaborate script. 

Once you’ve done the important work of increasing your speed-to-call success, coming across like a human being is only going to work in your favor. To the customer, it will feel like you were on the other end of your website, sitting by the phone and just waiting for a customer like them to call.

That’s what separates you from the rest—not any fancy script or opening hook.

The Power of Speed in Sales Calls

Your speed-to-call is everything. It’s how you “show up” for the potential customer. It’s how you differentiate your services. It’s how you get your customers on the phone the minute they’re most amenable to purchasing.

The key to increasing that speed is to realize you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be first.

If 90% of success in life really is about showing up, then that’s what I want you and your sales team to do. Build a system for showing up consistently for those inbound leads. And let your speed—and a no-nonsense approach to the call—do the rest of the work.