Sales scripts: what to write and how to check they are used

I come at this from the ad account, not from sales. When cost per customer climbs while cost per lead stays flat, the auction is almost never the cause. The leads are the same and the money is less, which means the answer is not in the account but in what happens to those leads.

First check whether a script is the issue at all

Before writing anything, answer four questions. If even one has no answer, a script will not help yet: it will sit in a document nobody opens.

Question	If there is no answer
How many minutes pass between enquiry and first contact?	The problem is speed, not wording. The lead went cold before the script started
How many enquiries last week got no reply at all?	The problem is tracking. Some leads never reach a person
How many got a second attempt after no answer?	The problem is persistence. One call is not an attempt
What exactly is said in response to «too expensive»?	The problem is the offer or the price, not the script

What a script people actually use contains

1. An opening line that lowers the guard. Nobody was expecting this call right now. Say who you are, where the enquiry came from, and how long this will take.
2. Two or three qualifying questions, no more. The goal is not to interrogate but to find out whether you can help at all.
3. An answer to what the person is afraid of. Not your list of advantages, but the specific fear in your category: timing, quality, returns, paying upfront.
4. The price, or a range, stated plainly. Dodging the price reads as an attempt to charge more. A range with an explanation beats «it depends on the project».
5. A specific next step with a date. Not «I will get back to you», but «I will send the quote by five, and if you have not heard from me by tomorrow, message me».
6. A plan for «let me think about it». That is not a refusal, it is the absence of a reason to decide today. You need to know in advance what reason you can give.

How to tell whether the script is working

A written script and a script in use are two different things, and asking the team is not how you find out. Three numbers, visible weekly, are.

• Time to first contact: median and worst case for the week. The average hides the failures.
• Share of enquiries with no contact attempt at all. Should be zero; in practice it is often around a tenth.
• Share of conversations that reached the price. Below half means the opening breaks, not the close.
• Contacts per decision. An average of one means there is no second call, and half your paid leads are sitting unused.

Where I fit in

I do not build sales teams or hire reps. I show, from the data, where the chain between advertising and money breaks, and which changes to lead handling recover the most from the budget you have already spent.

FAQ

Can I just use a template script from the internet?

As a skeleton yes, as a working document no. Templates are written without your price, your lead times and your objections, so they miss the only part that matters: what to say to what your customers actually ask.

My team says scripts sound unnatural. Now what?

They are usually right, and it is usually fixable. A script is not a text to read aloud, it is a list of what must be said and heard. The wording stays with the rep; the required points do not.

I have no CRM. How do I measure any of this?

A spreadsheet is enough to start: time of enquiry, time of first contact, number of attempts, outcome. Two weeks of that shows the bottleneck more precisely than any guess.