The Lead Cookie Sales Call Script: Seven Stages to a Decision

In December 2018, I reported 375 sales calls and 154 closed deals over a 16-month period at Lead Cookie, the LinkedIn prospecting service I founded and later sold. At about 30 minutes a call, that is roughly 187.5 hours of selling.

I didn't wing those calls. Over that time I read books, learned from other people and refined one framework that I took every prospect through, and it could get a good-fit buyer to a decision in 30 minutes. In December 2018 I published the document I had written for myself and followed until it became second nature. It is not the exact words I said on every call. It is the order of the conversation and the points I made at each stage.

This page keeps that script, with my figures and prices as history. It adds the pieces of the playbook that sat around the call (setting expectations, the emails, the deadline discount, the work after the sale) and says what has changed since. It is for a founder or leader of a service business who sells on calls, or who wants the call written down well enough for someone else to run it.

Why write the call down

When you wing a sales call, the customer controls the conversation, and the customer who controls the conversation controls the deal. You come across as less valuable and the prospect has less confidence in you. A written framework lets you guide each conversation through the same stages, however custom it becomes.

The script sat inside a bigger map. In November 2018 I published a map of every step a Lead Cookie lead went through, from first inquiry to the onboarding call, drawn in a simple Google Drawing. The scripts and details at each stage are of little use until you can see that whole path, and a digital map is easy to change as the process changes. The pieces on this page sit along that path in order: the new-lead email, the call, the post-call email for anyone who needs time, the next-steps email and invoice, then onboarding.

The seven stages at a glance

The call, stage by stage

The stages below follow my 2018 script: the quoted lines are from it, and the rest is adapted for today's reader. Lead Cookie ran LinkedIn outreach for its clients, so the pitch and the prices are specific to that service and that year. The structure is what transfers.

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Jake’s historical account, summarized from this article. These results describe his experience and are not a performance forecast.

Stage 1: Build rapport

Start by building rapport with the prospect. On remote calls, the other person's location was always an easy place to start. You are building trust and credibility, so keep it genuine and short.

Stage 2: Set the frame

Here is the frame I published in December 2018:

Thanks for hopping on the interview here. I will give you a quick framework of how these calls typically go. You see, we have a 30 day money back guarantee with our service and we are able to offer that because we are very picky about who we work with at Lead Cookie. The goal of this call is is to answer a simple question of "Is this a fit?"

Then I set out the call in three parts: my questions about their business, my view on whether it was a good fit, and an overview of the service and pricing with time for their questions. I closed the frame with "Does that sound good to you?"

This sets the frame and the expectations for the call. If the prospect tries to take over and start asking questions up front, calmly restate the plan. You lead the call and make space for questions at each stage.

The frame was honest because the guarantee was real. Lead Cookie refunded 100% of the fee to any client unhappy for any reason in the first 30 days of outreach, so signing a poor fit cost us money. As I wrote in a 2019 post on the guarantee, it moves a sales call "from a place of 'selling' to a place of 'qualifying' customers to see if they are a good fit." If you don't offer a guarantee, consider one in some form. In the same post I wrote, "I don't care what kind of company you run; you can add a guarantee to your sales process to reduce risks", with examples from a free first 14 days to 25% off a final invoice when a project misses its target. Taking on some of the risk yourself is what turns the call into a genuine decision about fit.

Stage 3: Ask questions

I never used every question. I mixed and matched what each conversation needed:

By the end you should understand the business and know whether this is a client you want to sign. The value question matters: once the prospect has said out loud what one client is worth, the price in stage 5 sits against a number they gave you.

Stage 4: Give reassurance

Great, so that answers most of the initial questions I have and helps me determine if it is a good fit. I will pivot now and share a bit more on my thoughts. Based on what I am hearing I believe this will be a good fit because...

Fill in the reasons from what they told you: similar clients you have helped, a high customer lifetime value, a strong value proposition. Then ask whether they have questions before you explain the service. Personal, specific feedback is what gives them confidence that the service will work for them.

Stage 5: Explain the service, set expectations and give the price

The 2018 Lead Cookie pitch had two parts: optimize the client's LinkedIn profile, then send up to 100 connection requests a day to their target prospects and follow each acceptance with a sequence of two or four messages over 30 days. We handed over warm conversations once someone replied; we did not take them all the way to a phone call.

If the prospect hasn't interrupted with questions by then, pause and ask whether it all makes sense so far. Then set expectations before price. I told prospects three things:

• They needed LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
• What we handed over was a LinkedIn conversation, and following up took on average 30 minutes a day.
• Most of our customers saw 30 to 100 warm conversations, not all of them qualified, and most booked 3 to 8 qualified calls a month.

Then the price, kept simple. Lite was a two-message sequence at a $250 setup fee plus $950 a month; Premium was a four-message sequence at a $500 setup fee plus $1,500 a month; both had a 3-month minimum. I restated the guarantee here: if a client wasn't happy with the quality or quantity of leads 30 days in, for any reason, we refunded 100% of their money. And I explained why we offered it and ran these interviews: we only wanted to sign people we were confident would see a positive return.

By the end of stage 5, every question about the service should be answered, and you should both agree on what is being offered. If you offer a deadline discount, explain its terms with the price; the section below covers how I used it.

Stage 6: The invitation

Alright [Name], based on how our conversation has gone today, I am confident that this will be a great fit because...

Comment on their value proposition, similar success stories, their need to generate more business now, and how confident you are in a positive return. Then ask for a commitment: "So with all of that being said, is this something you want to move forward with?"

Stage 7: Next steps

Great. In a moment I am going to be sending an invoice to your email. The 50% discount on that invoice has a 48 hour expiration timeline on it. Along with that invoice, I will send over an email outlining next steps to get started with our service. Do you have any other final questions on next steps?

The 48 hours here suited a small business; use whatever deadline you set at the price, and mention a discount only if you offered one. The last stage had one plain aim: collect payment and start the work cleanly.

Stop for questions until they understand

Lead Cookie's service was hard to grasp on first hearing, and many prospects had a lot of questions. If you talk without stopping, the prospect has to interrupt you, which gets awkward, or stays confused about something basic.

So plan breaks into the explanation and ask whether it makes sense so far. When you start explaining, the prospect has little or no understanding of the service. Before you can make the sale, they need a complete picture of how it works and what you do. The goal: 100% understanding of the service, with no open questions about how it works, by the time you get to the money.

The deadline discount

At the price, I also offered what I called the fast mover discount. The 2018 script put it this way:

Also, we like working with people who make decisions quickly so if you make a decision by [set a date 2-7 days away] we will offer you a 50% discount on your setup fee.

The sentence works for two reasons. The deadline gives a reason to decide now, and when several people have to approve, it gives the person on the call a reason to push the decision through. The stated reason ("we like working with people who make decisions quickly") makes the discount believable. Without it, a discount sounds like one you can claim whenever you like.

I set the deadline case by case. A small business where I spoke to the decision maker typically got 48 hours; a larger company, or a contact who needed approval from others, got 72 hours or up to 7 days. I confirmed the cutoff in an email right after the call.

Two cautions from using it:

• Don't offer it to someone who isn't ready. Some prospects should not buy today; they may need three to six months before they are in a good place to start. Pushing them with a deadline is not in their interest, and I believe in sales that are good for both sides.
• It changes your follow-up. Before the discount, I set aside two to three hours every two weeks to follow up with open leads, and that time usually closed at least one or two deals. After I introduced it, those follow-ups produced hardly any sales: the people who were going to buy had already decided. I cut back the follow-up time.

I learned the tactic from two friends in sales who had both studied Sam Ovens' sales material. I'm not certain he is its original source, but credit where it is due. Keep the deadline real: if you extend it for everyone who asks, it stops meaning anything.

Set expectations at four points

One of the biggest sales mistakes does not lose you the deal. You only see it once you work with the customer: misaligned expectations. Before we set them deliberately, customers came to us with expectations of their own. One told me, 30 days in, that they hadn't closed any deals. Their average sales cycle was six to nine months.

The idea I took from the book Customer Success (opens in a new tab) (Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman and Lincoln Murphy, 2016) is that expectations have to be set and then reset, because they drift as customers use the service. At Lead Cookie we did it at four points:

1. On the sales call. The expectations in stage 5: what we deliver, the numbers to expect and what the customer has to do.
2. Before the close. The first step in the next-steps email, before payment, was an onboarding video whose only purpose was to set expectations.
3. At onboarding. One of the last questions on the onboarding call was: "Knowing what you know about your sales process, if you were to look out 3 months from now, what would be success for you with this engagement?" When the answer was unrealistic, which it often was, we realigned it there.
4. At check-ins. Regular calls, or email for some customers, to ask whether they were happy and on the way to the outcome they wanted.

Once we did this, it aligned our relationships, reduced churn and made Lead Cookie a better experience and a more profitable company.

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The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

Hand the script to someone else

A written call matters most when someone else has to run it, which I learned the hard way. The first time I tried to hand off sales at Lead Cookie, about 10 months into the business, it failed. The process was "far too ambiguous and in my head", and I handed it over too fast. I took sales back, refined and automated the process, and documented it as the Lead Cookie Sales Playbook, of which this script was one part. My conclusion in January 2020 was that "you must build your sales process yourself and then hire someone else to operate it."

The second hand-off worked. My goal was for the new salesperson to handle closing independently within 90 days. The transition had three phases: training and shadowing my calls, running calls while I shadowed, then running them alone. We watched three numbers every week: new leads, sales calls held and deals closed.

The three emails around the call

Most of what you write around a sales call repeats. I kept three standard emails and pasted each with a text expander, a small program that turns a short code into a full block of text. My text expander was aText on a Mac, with codes such as "30cal" for my 30-minute booking link and "lcnextsteps" for the email below. Any text expander or a saved template in your email client does the same job. The brackets are the parts to write fresh for each person.

The second sentence is the one that matters: one personal line that confirms it was a good idea to contact you.

New customers wrote back to the next-steps email with lines like "Love it! It's great to see you have these defined processes right out of the gate." An organized close tells the buyer the service will be organized too.

The 2018 version of the third step asked clients to reset their LinkedIn password so our team could run their profile. Don't copy that. LinkedIn's User Agreement (opens in a new tab) (in the version effective November 3, 2025) has members agree to keep their password confidential and "not share or transfer your account or any part of it." I said as much about Lead Cookie in January 2019: "Lead Cookie is technically against Linkedin's terms of service." The rule of thumb that survives is to ask for the access you need before onboarding in a way the platform permits.

Automate what happens after the yes

Every new customer used to take me about 2 hours of work after the sale. By December 2018 it took 5 minutes.

The salesperson sent the next-steps email and filled in one form with the customer's details. The form set off a chain of steps: create the customer and the first invoice, add them to our customer database, create a task for accounting with any unusual billing terms, and post the details to a team channel, where a virtual assistant set up the customer's folders and template documents. The tools were Google Forms, Zapier, Invoiced, Asana, Airtable and Slack. Building it took me about 6 to 8 hours.

The week I wrote about it, we closed 11 sales. By hand, that would have taken 22 hours of my time; it took me 55 minutes, with a virtual assistant still handling the folders and template documents. The tools have changed since, and the principle hasn't: when the same post-sale steps repeat for every customer, turn them into one input and let it do the rest. The 2018 process also had a virtual assistant set up each client's account on our cloud servers so the team could log in and run their LinkedIn outreach. That step depended on operating the client's account, which the User Agreement rules out, so leave it out. Don't replace that team with software either: LinkedIn's help center (opens in a new tab), read in October 2026, says members who use third-party tools that "automate activity on LinkedIn's website" risk having their accounts restricted or shut down. Lead Cookie had removed bots from its LinkedIn service early on.

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Jake’s historical account, summarized from this article. These results describe his experience and are not a performance forecast.

Re-contact old prospects when the offer changes

In 2020 I described a tactic we had used twice at Lead Cookie: a reactivation campaign, which writes with a new offer to everyone who once showed interest and did not buy, or who bought and later left. We had over 2,000 inactive leads in our CRM.

We used it only when the offer had genuinely changed: first when we launched Lead Cookie Lite at a lower price point, then when we launched a Sales System across LinkedIn, email and phone. We exported every contact not active in the sales process, and the head of sales and I read the whole list and removed anyone we should not pitch again. This was the body of our email. Before adapting it, confirm you have a basis for consent, remove anyone who has opted out, and add the disclosures, postal address and opt-out described below:

Hi [first name], We spoke in the past about having Lead Cookie help ramp up sales for your business but we didn't go forward at the time. Recently we put together some new offers that encompass outreach across Email, LinkedIn, and phone. Would you be interested in learning more?

We got over a 10% response rate. Send slowly: the list is finite, a few weeks of sending lets you improve the message, and sending to everyone at once leads to overwhelm.

Before you send a campaign like this, check the rules. The FTC's CAN-SPAM guide (opens in a new tab) says the law "makes no exception for business-to-business email", and gives as its example a message to former customers announcing a new product line. Each commercial email needs a clear disclosure that it is an advertisement, a valid physical postal address and a clear way to opt out, and opt-outs must be honored within 10 business days. For messages covered by Canada's anti-spam law (opens in a new tab), a qualifying inquiry implies consent for six months and a qualifying purchase for two years; for an ongoing subscription or account, that period starts when the relationship ends. A prospect who asked about your service more than six months ago and never bought may need another basis for consent. For mail to personal Gmail accounts, Google's sender guidelines (opens in a new tab) have required every sender since February 1, 2024 to keep the spam rate reported in its Postmaster Tools below 0.3%, and tell anyone managing a mailing list to send only to people who want the messages. This is a summary of what the regulators and Google publish, not legal advice. For how cold email itself has changed, see my cold email playbook and what has changed since.

What still holds, and what has changed

What holds

Set the frame at the start and make the call a genuine decision about fit. Ask before you pitch, and tie the price to a value the buyer named. Stop for questions until they understand. Set expectations before they pay and keep resetting them. Write the process down before you hand it to anyone else. For more on running these conversations, I recommended two books in 2018: SPIN Selling and The Challenger Sale.

The call itself changed

By May 2020 the market wanted fewer, better campaigns, and Lead Cookie moved toward higher-quality outreach with appointment setting, at a higher price for different clients. The sales process changed with it: "We have now moved from a one call close to a 2 call close which includes a discovery call and a sales presentation." (May 2020) The 30-minute, one-call close suited a defined service at a few thousand dollars for the first three months. If your offer looks more like the later, tailored one, the same seven stages can run across two calls: stages 1 to 4 on the discovery call, stages 5 to 7 in the presentation.

What not to copy

Running clients' LinkedIn accounts was against LinkedIn's terms then, as I wrote in January 2019, and it still is. The playbook posts also skipped the anti-spam law that already applied to email like the reactivation campaign, and since February 2024 Google has set its own sender requirements for mail to Gmail accounts.

The numbers are history

The call totals were reported in December 2018 for a 16-month period, the prices and service expectations come from the December 2018 script, and the reactivation results were reported in May 2020. They show the framework was used; they are not a forecast for your business.

If you wrote down your own sales call today, which stage would be the hardest for someone else to run?