What's the actual setup time for Chloe, and what slows it down?

An hour to configure. A week, sometimes two, to actually be ready. Both numbers are true, and they're answering completely different questions.

The setup screen itself is fast — Close built it that way on purpose, and it genuinely delivers on that promise without any hidden catches in the interface itself. What takes longer is everything that has to exist before you sit down at that screen in the first place: a script, a defined segment, and criteria that actually reflect how your team sells on a real, unscripted call.

It's worth setting this expectation early and clearly with your whole team, because founders who plan around the one-hour figure alone tend to feel behind schedule by day three, when the real bottleneck was never the setup screen to begin with — it was everything upstream of it that nobody budgeted time for.

What's genuinely fast about Chloe's setup?

The technical configuration itself, start to finish, once everything upstream is actually ready to go. Connecting a phone number, assigning a lead segment, and turning the agent on really does take under an hour once you actually know what you're telling her to do and why each decision was made the way it was.

What actually eats the time?

Writing a script that holds up on a real, unpredictable call with an actual human on the other end. Deciding what actually counts as qualified in a way the whole team genuinely agrees on, not just nods along with in a meeting. Cleaning up the CRM fields Chloe needs to read from and write to accurately and consistently. None of that lives inside the setup screen. All of it has to exist before the setup screen ever matters at all.

What slows teams down the most in practice?

Trying to write the perfect script before making a single real call to test it against reality. The script gets better from real calls, not from more editing in a doc that nobody's tested against an actual conversation with a real prospect. Teams that launch to a small segment fast and iterate quickly move faster overall than teams stuck endlessly perfecting a script nobody's actually heard spoken aloud yet.

What does a realistic week-by-week timeline actually look like?

Days one and two: define qualification criteria as a team and draft the first version of the script together in one sitting. Day three: configure the technical side and launch to a small, contained segment of leads you can watch closely. The rest of week one and into week two: listen to real calls, adjust the script based on exactly what you hear, and expand the segment once it holds up consistently across a meaningful sample of calls.

By the end of week two, most teams have a script that's been through several real rounds of tightening based on actual conversations with real leads, and a genuine comfort level with the calls Chloe is actually making — which is a very different starting point than the uncertainty of day one, before any real data existed to work from.

What separates a fast setup from a slow one across different teams?

Almost never the technology itself, which behaves the same way for everyone regardless of team size. It's how quickly the team can agree on qualification criteria and commit to a first draft instead of debating it endlessly before ever actually testing it against a real lead on a real call. Teams with a single decisive owner for that first draft move noticeably faster than teams trying to reach consensus by committee before anything gets tested in the field.

So what's a realistic timeline overall for most teams?

A day or two to define qualification and draft a script as a team, working together in a focused session. An hour to configure the technical side once that's settled. A week or two of listening and adjusting before you genuinely trust the results coming out the other end. That's a real, honest setup — not the marketing version, the working version that actually holds up under real conditions.

Want the real timeline handled for you?

We compress the part that actually takes time — the script, the criteria, the CRM structure — so your setup week isn't spent guessing.

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