What is the best script for cold calling?

Cold Calling, arguably the most brutal part of sales, is what stops people from pursuing a career in it. Most of the time, people have no idea who you are, and then, you have to convince them to buy your product or service. Horrific, really, but in reality, cold calling does work and is the stepping stone of building a base of interested prospects or branching out to newer networks. In this day and age where people lead hectic lives, it is imperative to have the right methodology. If you want to get better at this skill, read on.

TONE: 

In the first five seconds of your call, it is very important to build rapport and trust with your prospects. How to do that?? Through Your Tone!! What you say is not as important as HOW you say it! (too many exclamations? Exactly! That’s how important it is to hold interest over the first few seconds, but Thank God, slamming phones is a thing of the past). The three major elements that must be implemented are:

Confidence:

You must sound confident and sure of yourself. If you sound confident in your calls, people are going to feel that confidence and be more receptive to you

Positivity:

You must sound positive, because positive energy translates into the right “vibes”

Openness:

You must sound friendly and open to not scare people away.

If you feel you are confident, positive and friendly and come up with that tonality, people are a lot more likely to listen to whatever it is you want to say. Be respectful, don’t sound needy or unsure of yourself .

THE SALES SCRIPT:

Before we get started on the script itself, you should know this: No matter what anyone might say or claim, a perfect script doesn’t exist. Period. Cold calling, cold emailing or sales in general don’t follow one method. There are multiple ways of doing them.

Below we’ll discuss a few of them:

PART ONE

START WITH A QUESTION call:

Example 1:

“Hey John, it’s Zoheb from ABC, How are you doing today?” Yes, it’s that straightforward. A lot of people disagree and say that you shouldn’t start with “how are you doing today?” However, it works because of the following reasons.

I’m addressing the person by the first name, showing that I did some preliminary research and I know who this person is.

I’m telling my name to them and what company I work with, to build some credibility.

Now, if you work with a famous company, then people already know who that is, but even if you work at a small company/agency, offering that information about yourself makes you less creepy.

Asking them how their day is going, opens up the conversation and allows them to share a little bit about their day. So if you did catch them on a great day, they will most probably say “oh it’s going great…” and then you can relate to them. But if they are having a bad day, and say something which is a general negative and nothing personal, such as horrible traffic; you have to relate to them and build on top of that.

Thus, it doesn’t matter what they say, what matters is how you bounce off their response and are able to build rapport or some type of connection during the first five seconds. 

Many people will respond with “my day is going pretty well” to which I will respond “oh, that’s great to hear!” which allows you to move on to the next part of your sales script.

“Thanks Zoheb, I am still not too keen on this script, do you have another phrase that I could use?” is a thing going on in your mind now. Try the next one then.

Example 2:

“Hey John, it’s Zoheb from ABC, Did I catch you at a bad time?” The only difference here is, you will get a straight yes or no answer right off the bat and building rapport will take a few seconds more. If you can get a “no, it’s a good time, wassup” using your new friendly voice super powers, you can continue your conversation confidently because now you have earned the permission to have that conversation. If someone says “now is not a good time”, then you follow up by asking them when would be a good time to call them back.

STRAIGHT TO THE OBJECTIVE call:

Example 3:

I personally like this method. So you call in and say “Hi John, this is Zoheb from ABC, I know you must be in the middle of something hence I’ll get straight to it. The reason I’m calling you is ….” Once you have completed your statement, give a pause, long one if needed. More often than not, people receiving a cold call just want to get done with it and get back to what they were doing. So if you ask them ‘How is your day?’ or ‘How are you doing?’, you’ll most probably get a curt reply which means you are already starting of at a wrong note, it’s very difficult to lift your conversation from there. Use this method to get straight to the point.

PART TWO

ASKING FOR HELP

The next part of this sales script is called “Asking for Help”. This part should come in after you have exchanged pleasantries. Once you have introduced yourself and have gotten the conversation going, you can move on to the next part of your call.

This method is typically used, when you are not a thought leader on the subject. Most often technology sales people who are cold calling are not looking to close a sale on the call but to setup a meeting so that a sales process is established. Tech sales is a complicated and multi-stage process. Hurry it up and you’ll either be left with a no-sale or a bad sales, both of which are not going to help you in the long run.

With the objective being to secure a meeting, that’s what you do next. Ask for the meeting, put it up on the calendar of all the stakeholders who’ll attend it and start preparing for it diligently.

While there will be a lot of times when the prospect will stall the conversation, there will be a few cases where the person you are calling is not the right person you intended to get in touch with. For example you wanted to reach out to the ‘John’ in procurement but ended up calling ‘John’ from marketing. In these cases politely ask the customer if they can help you with connecting with ‘John’ from procurement or even better ask them to help with you contacts within the company who might fit your needs. For some folks this might seem a far stretch. But you’ll be surprised how many times this will actually help you get connected with the right folks. Reason being, when somebody asks for help, other people naturally respond to it. Think of the random strangers you have shown directions to on the road or other acts of kind help you have received. It is natural and human to want to help a person out, even total strangers. So when you are cold calling people and are genuinely asking people for help, they will be naturally inclined to help you out. Therefore, the most common response you will receive will be positive.

PART THREE

BONUS conversation:

There are times (rare though) that the prospect was looking to hear from companies like yourself or is willing to share information that’ll help you get to the right person from the organization. For those scenarios, keep a concise pitch ready.

Zoheb: “Look, I manage a lot of programs/projects/resources for various tech companies, and what I do is help my clients, in the US, get the best resources and software for managing their services. That’s precisely why I called you because I noticed on your website that your organization was not using any software for your tech services <insert the reason why you are calling them>, so really, I just wanted to take 15 minutes to learn a bit more about your business and what you do, and see if I can help you out in any way. If at the end, we find that we can work together in some capacity, we can talk about what that looks like, but if not that sounds totally okay”

Points to remember during a cold call:

Mention

-who I am

-what I do

-what value I can bring to them

-how long the conversation will take

-what’s going to happen at the end of the conversation

-that I am not pushing this idea on somebody, instead, I am asking permission to see if this is something they actually want to do.

The next part of your sales process will join together seamlessly, which is asking them questions, understanding their pains and having that sales meeting. 

These are just some openers to get you started at the right tone. Every customer is going to be different, so you will have to change your strategy, sometimes on the fly. The only thing that will not change is you tone during the conversation. When the prospects put their barriers up in the first few seconds of the conversation you will have to get straight to the point. You have to be honest with yourself on how well you’re doing the first two steps. Always record yourself and listen to the recordings so you can improve your calls. As always, practice is everything.

Do tell me about what’s your biggest challenge around cold calling, and I can post another blog about it next time!