How to Create a Cold Calling Script

Creating a cold calling script is a huge help when it comes to starting a new cold call campaign. Each script should be tailored to the particular campaign you are running. Not necessarily tailored to the particular customer, the sales script should be designed flexible enough to survive the insertion of a customer name or product line.

Long term as you grow as a sales person you will find you don’t really need a detailed cold calling script but just an outline of talking points. Your goal as you become more experienced in sales is to move away from a sales script you are trying to read. In fact, a very important part of your growth as a sales person is that you should strive to have your calls not seem like you are reading from a page but rather in a more conversational tone.

Natural conversation leads to more successful sales calls as opposed to the robotic reading of a script.

Before you get to the point of writing sample cold calling scripts you should already have an in depth knowledge of your product or service. This is critical to being able to write a quality cold calling script and being able to handle customer objections during the call.

What should be in your cold calling script?

In the simplest of terms:

• Some sort of attention getting opening remark
• Identify yourself
• Tell them why you are calling
• How to handle common objections
• Build a bridge or connection.
• Call to action or proposal

You also need to understand the purpose of a cold call script before you start working on it. Determining what you are trying to accomplish is critical as you design your script and can guide you throughout the process. Yes, the ultimate goal is to make a sale but that is not really what you should focus on as the call begins. You should have a number of smaller goals that will lead you to follow calls and continued relationship building built into your sales script.

It is very rare for you to close the deal on the first call so you have to design your sales script with that in mind. You want continued contact through multiple channels if possible. So, what are some sample goals for you script?

• Find the correct contact person
• Get their direct phone number
• Get their email address
• Find out more about the person you are speaking with. Develop a connection.
• Find out what their needs are or what they are having issues with as compared to your product or service
• Make a proposal or some sort of call to action that gives you a reason to follow up

Based on all of this you are ready to start working on your sales script.

Start with an opening line like:

“Good morning/afternoon, my name is _________ with Acme Services, how are you today?”

“Hello, I am _______ with Acme Services, we specialize in improving the organic traffic to your website do you have a few minutes to talk.”

“Hello, I am _________ with Acme Services; do you have a few minutes to discuss _______?”

One thing I would try to stay away from in your opening line is any reference to price or saving the customer money. That is unless you intent to base your sale strictly on price. I don’t like to do that since I believe you should start with the quality of your product or service and how it will help your customer. Getting sucked into price only based sales doesn’t usually lead to long term customers. If they only care about price, you can bet someone else will call and driver the price down again. How far can you drop your prices before the customer no longer has any value to you?

After you have introduced yourself and identified who you are the next thing you should try and do is build a connection. There are a number of ways you can attempt that and in truth they are very difficult to script out ahead of time you have to ‘play it by ear’ during the call. But, you can make some notes at how you might do it.

How do you build a connection?

Look for common ground between you and your prospect. Look for conversation starters. Some areas you might find you can make a connection would be in discussing family, job, hobbies and motivation.

Things like:

“Tell me about your family.”
“How did you meet your husband/wife?”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Why did you move?”

“Tell me about your job/business.”
“What is the best part of your job?”
“What are the challenges you face in your job?”
“How did you get into this profession?”

“What do you do in your spare time?”
“What is your favorite food/restaurant?”

“If you weren’t at work where would you be?”
“Do you like to travel?”
“Where did you go on your last vacation?”

Sometimes it is easier to connect in person as opposed to on a phone call. If you are in the person’s office you can look around their office and desk for clues about what to talk about. One the phone it is a little more difficult, you need to lead them into more broad discussions perhaps like:

“How long have your worked at ________?”
“Where did you work before?”
“What make you make the change?”

These are all just examples and some might not be appropriate until you get to know the person better, which is fine. Again, this is about building a connection.

Handling objections is an important part of your cold call script.

The best way to determine what kinds of objections you might get is to role play with another sales person with one of you playing the customer and the other playing the sales person.

What kinds of objections you might face depend somewhat on your product or service. But some common ones are:

“I don’t have time to talk right now.” This is a pretty common objection you will run into, the key here is to not push. You should try to do two things when a prospect says this. One is tell them you will call back tomorrow, don’t volunteer to let them set the time. If they object and suggest another day or time that is fine. The second is get their email address. Say something like, “I know you are busy, if you could give me your email address I will send you something on our company for your review and call you back tomorrow (maybe 2 days later if you get the email address).”

“I have had bad luck with your company before.” If you get this objection I would apologize and say that changes have been made to correct any issues they have had in the past. Of course, it is pretty important you know what those issues are. Hopefully, it is in your customer relationship manager software (CRM). If not, ask what happened before you promise it is corrected. This is also a great way to extend the conversation and build a connection.

“We are happy with who we have now.” This can be a more difficult objection. One thing I would do is get an email address by telling them you want to make sure they have your contact information in case something changes in the future. The next thing I would like to do is try and ask some probing questions about the customer service they get and product/service quality they are getting from their current provider. You want to try and differentiate your company from their current provider very quickly before they hang up on you. Try not to immediately jump to a price sales tactic. Sometimes you have to if you are getting stiff resistance but once you head down that road it is hard to ever get off of it.

“All a care about is price, if you can’t save me money there is no reason to talk.” To me, this is a warning sign I probably don’t want to proceed with this customer. If you do choose to move forward using price as the primary sales tool then just be aware this customer will probably not be a long term customer unless you can convince them that your quality of service/product is significantly better than your competitors. This should be your main goal if you close this customer, otherwise they will change companies every time someone offers them a cheaper rate or come back to you consistently for rate reductions.

There are a lot other objections you will come up against. You can identify most of these during your role playing and as you make calls. Keep a list of any objection you get and work on a reply. Your cold call script is a living document.

Lastly, as you develop your sales script don’t forget the ‘call to action’. This is what gives you a reason to follow up or call back. This should be some sort of an action item such as sending them an email summary of what you spoke about and then calling them back as a follow up. You always need a reason to follow up.

What now?

Start with practice. The best way is what we described above, role playing. The best way to role play is in front of a group of other sales people. Not too large of a group, I would recommend between 5 to 10 people. You want enough to make you a little nervous but not so many that everyone cannot contribute to the process.

The idea is for everyone to take multiple turns being both the sales person and the customer. The customer should be resistant but not combative. Again, remember the idea is to replicate what you are likely to face on a real cold call.

I would suggest at least a day of this type of training if you are building a new cold call script.

Go into the training with a starter cold call script and then make changes as each person takes their turn as the sales person. See how your sales script holds up, see if you have identified the objections you might face. Modify the script and try again with the next two sales people. Perhaps rotate a new person in as the sales person and rotate the previous sales person to the customer role.

Keep doing this until everyone becomes comfortable with the script and you have refined the cold call script enough that it is usable. It does not have to be perfect, it never will be.

I would suggest videoing the training. Give each person a copy of the video and perhaps even review it during the training. These videos can be a very effective way to ‘drill in’ a training session.  

 

Read Next: Is Sales Right for You?