For me, this is the normal way of finding a job, perhaps only once did it not work that way. Perhaps this is because I work as a contractor and generally find things through recruitment agents. The agents also do a lot of the filtering so the end clients only get presented with a smaller number of high quality candidates.
What I tend to do is send my CV to an agent, then I phone them right away on the pretext that I am just checking my CV came to their email since attachments sometimes get spam/virus filtered out unintentionaly. Really I am phoning to promote myself, find out about the job, and if its something right for me that I am the candidate that they are going to put forward. So I would insert at step 3, chatting up the agent.