Reading Time – 3 minutes

Unchained CEO attracts a certain kind of person: introverted, analytical, high-IQ, heavy on formal or self-education. Engineers, IT pros, doctors, finance folks—nerds in the best sense. That’s an advantage when you’re building a location-independent business. It also hides a fatal weakness: many of you don’t communicate well enough to turn expertise into money.

If you want fast income with a consulting offer or a business service, you can’t hide behind assets and ideas. You need conversations that uncover real problems and move to clear next steps. You don’t have to become a performer. You need a few simple habits that make your calls shorter, calmer, and more profitable.

In business, control comes from questions, not monologues. Whether you’re doing niche research, a sales call, or a delivery check-in, spend most of your words asking and then listening. If you’re talking at length, you’re teaching; if you’re asking well, you’re diagnosing and leading.

Practical target: aim for roughly an 80/20 split—about 80 percent questions and listening, 20 percent short summaries and next steps. If you need to present, keep it brief and return to questions quickly.

Use visual prompts you can’t ignore

You will forget to shut up when you get excited. Put physical cues in your line of sight, just off camera if you’re on Zoom:

• listen
• ask a question
• wait three beats
• keep it short

A small mirror near your screen helps too; seeing a relaxed face softens your tone automatically.

The one-third impulse rule

Smart people interrupt because they think three steps ahead. Here’s a mechanical fix: only speak on every third urge to speak.

Count the impulses. First urge—don’t talk. Second urge—still don’t talk. Third urge—ask a question or give a one-sentence summary. It will feel slow. Good. Money likes slow, steady conversations more than caffeinated debates.

 

Make silence do the work

Strategic pauses make people keep talking, and what they say next is usually the truth. If dead air spooks you, keep a short list of bridge questions:

• Can you walk me through a recent example
• What happens downstream when that occurs
• If we improved this by 20–30 percent, what would that change this quarter

Record the game and watch the tape

You can’t improve what you can’t hear. Record calls for your own review and delete them afterward. Follow the laws where you live. When you listen back, study yourself, not the other person:

• Talk-to-listen ratio
• How often you interrupted
• How often you spoke without asking a question
• Whether your summaries were crisp and accurate
• Whether your pace sounded rushed, flat, or confident

Fix one thing per week. The gains compound quickly.

A simple call structure that sells itself

This skeleton works for research, sales, and delivery:

1. Open with context and permission
Thirty seconds on what you’ll cover and a promise to keep it brief.

2. Diagnose with three to five sharp questions
Symptoms, impact, timeline. Use their words back to them. Don’t editorialize.

3. Summarize what you heard
Two or three sentences max. Confirm you’re on target.

4. Propose one next step
In research, maybe a follow-up interview. In sales, a tight outcome they already said they want, with a clear price and timeline. In delivery, the next milestone and what you need from them.

If you freeze, pre-write three questions you can always return to.
If you ramble, cap yourself at one sentence per answer and end with a question.
If you speak too fast, put a sticky note near the lens that says slow down.

These are tiny mechanical tweaks. They change how people feel on the other end of the line.

Nobody is asking you to become a world-class orator. If you improve your communication by 60–80 percent, your pipeline will do the rest. Fewer words, better questions, calmer pauses. That’s the set of habits that converts an intelligent offer into checks.

A strong offer with weak communication limps along. An adequate offer with strong communication closes and compounds. Pick a niche, target a painful problem, then run cleaner calls than your competitors: ask more, say less, listen longer, propose simply. Do that for a few weeks and you’ll stop refreshing dashboards and start collecting receipts.

AI did NOT write this article. The article comes 100% from me and is 100% my content. However, AI was used to transcribe this content from some of my other social media which is why the voice is a little different. It’s still 100% my content and not written by AI. AI will never “write” my content!  Remember that you can always go to calebjonesblog.com and subscribe to my Substack if you want articles physically written by me with no AI involvement whatsoever.

Leave your comment below, but be sure to follow the Five Simple Rules.