What is a sales call?
A sales call is a conversation with a possible buyer that has one job: to move the deal one agreed step forward. The step depends on the type of call, so decide which one you are making before you dial or open the video link.
| Call type | Typical length (our planning figure) | Your goal | The next step to ask for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cold call | 2 to 6 minutes | Earn a proper conversation | A booked 20 to 30 minute call with a date |
| First call or discovery | 20 to 30 minutes | Find out whether there is a real problem worth solving now | A demo or proposal call with the right people in it |
| Demo or proposal call | 30 to 45 minutes | Show how the problem gets solved and agree scope | A decision date, a trial or a signed order |
| Follow-up call | 10 to 20 minutes | Clear the open questions | The decision, or the one thing still blocking it |
The lengths are our own planning figures for small B2B deals, not research findings. This guide covers the habits every type shares. For the words themselves, use our cold call script. For the middle of a first call, use our discovery call question bank for founders.
How do you prepare for a sales call?
Spend 10 to 15 minutes, and write the answers down where you will see them during the call. Our pre-call checklist has six lines:
- One recent change. A hire, a new office, a funding round, a price change, a post they wrote. You will open with it.
- Who they are. Role, how long in the job, and who else probably has a say.
- How they reached you. Inbound form, reply to an email, referral. It sets how much they already know.
- Three questions. About their current way of doing the work, what it costs them, and why now.
- The next step you will ask for. Written as a sentence with a day in it.
- Logistics. Their time zone, the link, a phone number in case the video fails.
Timing matters most for inbound leads. In a study published in Harvard Business Review in March 2011, James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington (Elkington was then chief executive of InsideSales.com, a sales software company) audited 2,241 US companies by sending each a web test lead. 37% responded within an hour, 24% took more than 24 hours and 23% never responded. In a separate study of 1.25 million leads at 29 B2C and 13 B2B US companies, firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it (a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as firms that tried an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as those that waited 24 hours or longer. The data is from 2011 and covers web leads, not cold lists, but the direction is clear: when someone asks to talk, call that hour if you can.
How should a sales call be structured?
Use five parts, and keep the pitch to the fourth. Timings below are for a 25-minute first call and are our template, not a tested formula.
Open with the reason you are calling
Name, company, why this person, and how long you need. Then confirm the time and say what you plan to cover. Gong's own blog post on cold calls (published 16 August 2021) reports a 2.1x higher success rate for salespeople who state their reason for calling; it doesn't say how many calls were measured or how success was defined. For cold-call openers in detail, see our breakdown of the permission opener and Gong's 300 million calls.
Ask how they handle it today
Who does the work, with what tools, and what happens when it goes wrong. Ask, then stay quiet while they answer.
Follow up on what they just said
Pick the one or two problems that came up and ask what they cost and why they matter now. This is where most of the useful facts come from.
Connect what you do to their words
Describe only the part of your offer that answers what they told you, in their language, with one example. Then ask whether it matches what they need.
Agree the next step
Propose it, put a date on it and send the invite while you are both still on the call.
How much should you talk on a sales call?
On a first or discovery call, talk a little over half the time at most, and mostly in short turns. On a cold call, expect to carry more of it. Here is what the research says, with its limits.
| Source and date | What was measured | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| Gong Labs (vendor), published 21 August 2025 | 326,000 recorded sales calls of at least 10 minutes | Sellers talked 60% of the time on average: 57% on won deals, 62% on lost deals. Low performers swung from 54% when they won to 64% when they lost; high performers stayed about the same |
| Gong blog (vendor), 16 August 2021, last modified 4 March 2026 | Cold calls; the post says only that its team analysed thousands | Reps talked 55% of the time on successful cold calls, and their average monologue was 53 seconds against 25 seconds on unsuccessful ones |
| Karen Huang, Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, Julia Minson and Francesca Gino (Harvard University), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2017 | Live 15-minute chats between strangers, plus speed-dating transcripts | People who asked more questions, especially follow-up questions, were liked more by the person they spoke with |
The 2025 figures come from calls analysed on Gong's own platform, the 2021 post doesn't say where its calls came from, and both are correlations: a buyer who is keen may simply talk more. Gong's 2025 talk-to-listen analysis also found that winning sellers asked 15 to 16 questions per call and losing sellers about 20, and that lost deals often feature long seller monologues. Its advice includes pausing for two seconds before you reply, so you don't cut the buyer off.
The academic study explains why the questions matter. In the first of its experiments, 398 people in 199 pairs chatted online for 15 minutes; one person in each pair was told to ask at least nine questions or at most four. Partners of the many-question askers rated their liking at 5.79 on a 7-point scale against 5.31 for the few-question askers, and the askers themselves did not expect the difference. In the paper, follow-up questions, the ones that build on what the other person just said, were the type linked to liking. The settings were social chats and speed dates, not sales calls, and the study's abstract lists both; the authors also note that asking too many questions without sharing anything about yourself may lower liking. The practical rule we take from it: when the buyer finishes a sentence, ask about that sentence before you move to your next topic.
How do you end a sales call with a next step?
Ask for one specific next step, with a date, before the last three minutes. A vague "let's keep in touch" is not a next step. These lines are ours; change the words to suit you.
Send the calendar invite while they are still on the call and ask them to accept it. If they won't commit to a date, treat the deal as stalled, not as progressing.
If you'd like help with first calls, Siela's Call Agent joins Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams calls from a brief you write in plain words, asks one question at a time and afterwards gives you a summary, each point from the brief with the person's answers in their own words, and a suggested next step. It does not make phone calls.
What should you do after a sales call?
Write your notes within the hour and send a short recap the same day. Those deadlines are our rule, not a research finding; the point is to write it while the buyer's exact words are fresh. Our guide to the first 24 hours after a sales call has the five-line note and a recap email you can copy.
How many sales calls you should make is best answered by working backwards from your own numbers. Here is a worked example with made-up rates for a sample company, Northwind Ltd:
| Step | Northwind's example rate | Arithmetic | Needed per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| New customers wanted | 3 | ||
| First calls that become customers | 1 in 5 | 3 x 5 | 15 first calls |
| Cold conversations that book a first call | 1 in 6 | 15 x 6 | 90 conversations |
| Dials that reach the right person | 1 in 10 | 90 x 10 | 900 dials |
900 dials over 20 working days is 45 a day. If Northwind books more first calls through referrals or inbound leads, the dial count falls with them. Swap in your own rates after a month of tracking; until then, treat any benchmark as a guess.
How do you practise sales calls?
Mostly by making real calls and listening back. We read two r/sales threads on this: a September 2022 thread from a new SDR told by a trainer that they sounded stiff (60 comments), and a January 2024 thread from someone with nobody to role-play with (13 comments). Four habits came up in the replies:
- Call real but lower-stakes contacts first, such as more junior people at companies you want to sell to.
- Record your calls, listen back and note what to change. One commenter's routine: "Record yourself and write down things you could get better at."
- Role-play with a manager, a colleague or an AI voice assistant playing a sceptical buyer.
- Keep a tally of the objections you hear; one commenter expected two to five to come up most often, and prepares answers for those.
How long it took to feel natural varied: answers in the 2022 thread ranged from a few weeks to several years, and one commenter who made 50 to 70 dials a day said slight nerves before the first Monday call lasted six to eight months. These are individual accounts, not a measured average.
A one-page sales call checklist you can print
This week, print it, use it on your next three calls, and record at least one of them (with the other person's consent) so you can check your own talk time.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a sales call last?
It depends on the type. A cold call that goes well is usually a few minutes long, because its only job is to book a proper conversation. A first or discovery call usually needs 20 to 30 minutes, and a demo 30 to 45. Book the shortest slot that fits the goal, and say at the start how long you need.
How many sales calls should a salesperson make a day?
There is no single right number. Work backwards: decide how many new customers you need, then divide by your own conversion rate at each step, from dials to conversations, conversations to booked calls and booked calls to customers. A month of tracking gives you rates you can trust more than any published benchmark.
How do I practise cold calling on my own?
Record yourself delivering your opener and your answers to the three objections you hear most, then play it back and cut anything that sounds read. Make your first real calls to lower-stakes contacts, listen back to recordings where the other person has agreed, and ask a colleague or an AI voice assistant to play a difficult buyer.
Should I use a script on a sales call?
Use a script for the opening and for the next-step ask, because those are the parts where wording matters most and nerves hit hardest. For the middle of the call, use a short list of questions instead, so you can follow up on what the buyer actually says rather than reading the next line.
What should you never do on a sales call?
Avoid pitching before you know the problem, talking in long monologues, firing off questions without following up on the answers, and ending without a dated next step. Also avoid promising prices, dates or features you can't confirm. Say you will check and put the answer in your recap email.
Sources
- Gong Labs, Mastering the talk-to-listen ratio in sales calls (published 21 Aug 2025; checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Gong, Evolve the cold call: 8 data-driven techniques to surpass quota (published 16 Aug 2021, last modified 4 Mar 2026; checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, Harvard Business Review (March 2011; checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Harvard Kennedy School, It Doesn't Hurt to Ask: Question-Asking Increases Liking (abstract) (2017; checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Huang et al., It Doesn't Hurt to Ask, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113(3), full text (published online 27 Apr 2017; checked 5 Nov 2026)
- r/sales thread: How long did it take for you to get better at cold calling? (15 Sep 2022; checked 5 Nov 2026)
- r/sales thread: How do you practice cold-calling objections? (19 Jan 2024; checked 5 Nov 2026)