The First Call: 10 Questions That Qualify or Kill a Lead

The first call to a local business is not a discovery call, and treating it like one is why most scripts fail. A discovery call happens because somebody booked it. This happens because you interrupted a shop owner who was doing something else.

So the questions have to earn their place. These ten are ordered by how willing somebody is to answer them in the first two minutes, and four of them exist to kill a lead rather than to continue with it.

Owners like talking about their business and dislike being sold to, and these three are firmly on the first side of that line.

1. "How long have you been here?" Nearly everybody answers this warmly, and the answer tells you a great deal — a business at eleven years has survived things, has regulars, and has never needed a website, which is a different conversation from a business at eighteen months.

2. "How do most of your customers find you?" The most valuable question in the entire call. "Word of mouth" means a weak case. "They walk past" means footfall, so it depends on the ticket. "They call, or they find us on Google" means they have just told you they are already being searched for.

3. "What do people ask you most on the phone?" This is where the pitch comes from. Timings, price, stock, whether you do a particular thing — every one of those is a page, and now it is their answer rather than your claim.

Now you are establishing whether this is a business worth your afternoon.

4. "Do you get enquiries from outside the neighbourhood?" Yes means reach is worth something to them. No, and they do not want any, means the whole discoverability argument is dead and you should know that now.

5. "What's the busiest thing you do — the thing you'd want more of?" Not "what do you sell". The answer names the transaction the website should be built around: the custom cake, the contractor order, the bridal commission, the annual admission.

6. "Roughly what's that worth to you, one customer over a year?" Blunt, and almost everybody answers it, because owners know this number. It sets your quote before you have quoted anything.

7. "Who else would need to be happy with this — a partner, family?" The local version of asking about decision authority, and it never sounds like a qualification question. If there is a brother who handles "computer things", you need to know before, not after.

These exist so you can leave early. Nothing in the published discovery material contains questions like this, because those reps are not permitted to disqualify. You are, and it is the most valuable thing you can do with a bad prospect.

8. "Has anyone built you one before?" A bad previous experience is the single hardest objection in this business, and it is much better encountered in minute three than in week three. If the answer is yes and it went badly, the conversation you are now having is about trust, not websites, and it is a longer one.

9. "If we did this, when would you actually want it live?" Vagueness here is the most reliable predictor of a project that never starts. "Sometime, we'll see" is not a timeline, it is a polite no with better manners.

10. "Is this something you'd decide, or would you want to think it over with someone?" Perfectly friendly, and it separates the conversation that can close from the one that needs a second visit — which is fine, as long as you know which you are in.

You will not get through ten questions on a first call and should not try. You will get four or five, and which four decides everything.

The sequence is deliberate: warm, then useful, then disqualifying. Ask about the money in the first thirty seconds and the shutter comes down. Ask how long they have been there, then how customers find them, and by question five you are having a conversation rather than conducting an interview.

The disqualifying ones go last for the same reason. If you never reach them, you have lost nothing — the business was not going to buy today anyway.

Write it immediately after leaving, not in the evening. By evening you will have four conversations blurred into one, and the specific phrase the owner used — which is the thing that makes the follow-up feel personal — will be gone.