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The conversation's stops, before its lines

By the end, you'll have your script's four fixed stops written down on a sheet, and you'll know exactly which one gets the booking or payment link.

By Yodai · Published September 6, 2026 · Updated October 13, 2026

Someone texts you on WhatsApp: "Hi, how much does it cost?" You answer. Five minutes later someone else texts with a different question, and you answer that one a different way, because in that moment something else occurred to you. Neither conversation looks like the last one.

You change your approach every time because you haven't decided ahead of time what stages any conversation needs to go through before it reaches the booking or payment link. Without that settled, every message becomes a fresh improvisation, and whoever helps you answer messages improvises their own way too: nobody knows whose turn it is to ask, offer, or charge.

Before you write a single reply, decide how many fixed stops your script has.

One stop per decision, not per question

A stage isn't a topic of conversation. It's a point where what you say next changes based on what the customer answered. If the answer doesn't change anything that comes after, that question stays inside the stage you're already in.

The price gets settled inside the offer stage. The schedule, inside the filter. Neither one opens a new stage, even though they're the questions you get asked most. That distinction is what separates a four-stop script from a twenty-stop one: twenty separate questions almost always fit inside the same four decisions.

I have a strong opinion about this: if while writing the script you find yourself counting more than five or six stages, you don't have a complicated business. You have poorly sorted questions.

Every extra step costs you something. Every step you add to the script is one more thing you or your team have to remember, and a new place where the conversation can get stuck. And if a bot is answering for you, the conversation always needs a way out to a real person, and on WhatsApp that's not optional: if you're replying with automated messages through the WhatsApp Business platform, its business messaging policy requires fast, clear, direct ways to exit the bot, like handing the chat off to someone on your team, a phone number, or an email address. If your filter has three questions and you suddenly add a fourth one that doesn't actually change the price or availability, all you've done is make the conversation longer before the link shows up, and that's time customers aren't always willing to give. Online shopping has the numbers to prove it: according to the Baymard Institute, 17% of US online shoppers have abandoned an order because checkout was too long or complicated.

The four stops of any script

The same four stops, in different businesses

At a hair salon, the filter asks whether the service is a haircut, color, or both, and for which day of the week; the quote gives the price based on that and notes if a separate wash is needed. At an English-language school, the filter asks the student's level and whether they want private or group lessons; the quote changes based on both answers, because the hourly rate isn't the same. At a tax and bookkeeping firm, the filter asks whether the client is self-employed or runs an LLC, and what they need: a new registration, quarterly filings (as a general rule, VAT returns are filed by calendar quarter, under the VAT Regulations), or a one-time consultation. Here, the quote almost never includes a set price in the first message: it gives a range, and the exact price comes after reviewing the paperwork. And at a home remodeling company, the filter asks what kind of job it is and in what kind of home. The close sends a link to book a measuring visit, because the price depends on seeing the space.

What gets asked inside each stop changes. Even what gets handed over at the close changes, and it's not always a direct charge. What doesn't change is the number of stops. And that's the point you need to take away from this lesson: your business's script, whatever it is, gets built with the same four boxes.

Always four stops?

This is what the filter sounds like, not the offer

Writing the lines before the stages is the costly mistake

With the four stops decided, you already have the skeleton of your script, even before you've written a single sentence. Sort into them the questions you already know by heart because customers ask them every week, and you'll find that almost all of them fit without any effort. And if a bot is answering for you, the offer comes from the business details you've given it in writing, like prices, hours, and terms: it can't quote a price that isn't there, so every question you build into the offer needs its matching detail on file.

Before you write the first line of your script, grab a piece of paper and write the four stops, one under the other. Under each one, jot down the two or three questions your customers actually ask you at that point in the conversation. That paper is the map you'll follow when it's time to write the exact lines.

In the next lesson, you write the last stop first, the close, not the first one.

You already know which answer goes in which stop. What you don't know yet is how each one ends, and that closing line, not the greeting, is what you're going to write first in the next lesson.

In Yodai the WhatsApp bot answers with your prices and your hours, and hands the chat over when someone asks for a person. See how the WhatsApp bot for your business works.