Stop Chasing, Start Talking: Get Your Leads To Pick Up The Phone

This broker does not sell courses or coaching. He does not have a personal brand and would cringe if we tagged him in this. What he does have is a near 100% contact rate with his leads.

Most of our clients work a 10 minute rule. If it is office hours and nobody has called the lead within 10 minutes, something has gone wrong. It is the right rule and it works 8 times out of 10. Not every time.

Most of them also send a text, an email or a WhatsApp when a lead comes in. It does not seem to help as much as it should. Except for this one client.

The difference is what he puts in the WhatsApp message, and more importantly what he has taken out.

First, it is probably not you

A lot of brokers take it personally when a new lead does not pick up. Call screening is the bigger part of it. Phones now answer for people and ask who is calling before it ever rings properly, and plenty of people have no idea it is even switched on at their end.

So you get the awkward pause, then “hello, hello”, and the lead never hears a human. If you hit a screening prompt, say exactly who you are and where you are calling from: “This is Joe Bloggs from Joe Bloggs Mortgages, you enquired about a mortgage.” Some people will pick up on the spot. Say nothing useful and it sounds like spam.

Five or ten minutes is a long time to a person who filled in a form while doing something else. Your enquiry is not the most important thing in their day, even when the mortgage is.

The 12 word message

He stripped the fluff out, applied a concept called word jenga, and now sends this:

“We just got your enquiry, are you free for a call now?”

12 words. No fluff. No fake rapport. He calls it a game changer.

Why it works

• It takes no time and no mental energy to read.
• It is easy to answer. A thumbs up is enough, and people will send a thumbs up when they will not type a sentence.
• People get fewer WhatsApp messages than emails, so it gets seen.
• It asks for a reply, so you get an answer either way instead of guessing.

What is not helping

Here is the kind of message we see far more often:

“Thank you for your enquiry. One of our senior mortgage brokers will be delighted to call you back soon. They will ask a few questions about your current situation and provide you with some suitable options. Alternatively you can book an appointment with one of our team. In the meantime, if you have not got a copy of your credit report, try this link, there are seven day free trials at all the major credit reference agencies. We are an award winning mortgage and protection brokerage who…”

It is too long. It is too polite. It never asks them to reply. It is a professional message written with the best intentions, and it gets ignored.

If it looks like a block of text, it does not get read. People scan. And when there is no question in it, even a lead who is keen has no obvious way to tell you so.

The proof

The book Writing for Busy Readers has six principles. Number one is use fewer words. The authors had the tricky job of getting people to fill in a survey, which is something nobody wants to do:

• 49 word email: 4.8% completed the survey
• 127 word email: 2.7% completed the survey

Same ask. Nearly double the response, purely for saying less.

It worked for us too

We cut our own newsletter down to a paragraph, three sentences at most, and used the copy to tease what was behind the link instead of explaining everything in the email. There is more on that experiment in short emails get more clicks.

• Before, long emails: 1% click rate
• After, short emails: 6% to 14% click rate

For context, cross industry newsletter click through rates sit around 1.5% to 3%, and curated B2B newsletters around 4% to 6%. Our worst month after the change beat the best of that benchmark. That is not us being brilliant. That is us saying less.

What word jenga is

Word jenga is taking words out of a sentence until it is about to fall over, and stopping just before. You remove the fluff without losing the meaning.

The hard part is that writing less takes longer. Padding is easy.

Try it on your own messages

1. Write the message as you normally would.
2. Take out every word the message survives without. Cut the thank yous and the justification for getting in touch.
3. Check there is still a question in it.
4. Send the short version and watch what happens.

AI is genuinely good at this bit. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude if it knows what word jenga is, then give it your sentence. Google Docs has a text refining feature that does something similar. We have a Gemini gem preloaded with the instructions so we can run anything through it.

Start with the messages you send most: the new enquiry text, the appointment reminder, the Google review request. Nobody is going to be offended that you did not thank them for their enquiry.

Why this matters more than another lead source

If you are spending money, time and effort generating leads, sending a message that gets answered is the cheapest improvement available to you. More leads you actually speak to, more appointments, more mortgages written. No extra ad spend.

Half of your enquiries may never come through a form at all, which is worth a read too: inbound calls could be half your mortgage leads.

Try it and tell us how you get on. Genuinely, we want to know. And if you want more leads to speak to in the first place, here is how we generate mortgage leads.