How to open a client video call without small talk

Video slows down the quick back-and-forth that small talk depends on. In a 2022 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, the gap before the next person spoke averaged 135 milliseconds face to face and 487 milliseconds over Zoom, for the same pairs of people.¹ Banter needs fast turns. On a call, every light remark lands a beat late.

Stanford's Jeremy Bailenson makes the same point about the cues around the words. On Zoom, he writes, "users need to work harder to send and receive signals."² A nod, a glance, a half-laugh: the signals that carry small talk in a room are the ones a video call loses first.

Not entirely, but the best sellers use less of it. Gong, which records and analyzes sales calls, reported that "top performers engage in 17% less small talk than average and bottom performers." That is Gong's own data, published in 2020.³ Less, not none. One friendly line is fine. Five minutes on the weather is not.

You also need less warm-up than you think. A 2018 study in Psychological Science, led by Erica Boothby, found that after a conversation people "systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company."⁴ The researchers call it the liking gap. Your client probably likes you more than your nerves suggest, so you do not have to earn the right to start.

A good opening line is specific to the person, shows you prepared, and leads straight to the reason for the call. It asks something only this client can answer: what they said last time, what changed on their side, what they chose. A generic question gets a generic answer.

"Participants were especially prone to overestimate how awkward deep conversations would be compared with shallow conversations."

Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2022⁵

The same researchers found that people felt more connected to the partner in a deep conversation than in a shallow one, once they had tried both.⁵ Their participants were strangers, not buyers. The lesson still travels: the specific question is less awkward than it feels before you ask it.

Start with a question only this client can answer, then say why you are meeting and how long it will take. Here are lines to adapt.

A first call with a new prospect

• "You said in your email that onboarding new hires is the priority this quarter. Is that still true?"
• "Before I say anything about us, what made you take this call now?"

A follow-up

• "Last time you said the rollout was waiting on IT sign-off. Did that move?"
• "You were going to take this to your finance team. How did that land?"

A renewal or a check-in

• "What has changed for your team since we last spoke?"
• "If you could change one thing about how we work together, what would it be?"

Avoid asking permission to be there. Gong analyzed 90,380 cold calls and found that openers asking "Did I catch you at a bad time?" succeeded 0.9% of the time, against a 1.5% baseline. Opening with "The reason for my call is" raised the success rate 2.1 times.⁶ Those were cold calls, not client meetings, but the lesson holds: say why you are there.

Also skip three minutes of "can you hear me", a history of your company, and any question the client's own website already answers. Each one tells the client you did not prepare.