If you can design your cold call script to uncover the pain and challenges the prospect is experiencing, you will greatly improve your ability to generate leads. Unfortunately, that is a little easier said than done, as pain is often something fairly difficult to uncover in a quick cold call. But there are some small things you can do to improve your ability to do this.
Connect your pre-qualifying questions to pain
Whether this is for cold calling or just talking with prospects in any other setting, you should have a short list of pre-qualifying questions to determine whether there is a potential fit and whether it makes sense to even talk. If you want questions that do a good job of assessing the level of fit, tie them to the pain you help resolve.
Here is an example of how to apply this to your cold call script. If you help to resolve the pain of errors occurring with the orders that are submitted to suppliers, then you can ask the pre-qualifying question below:
How often are errors occurring with the orders that get submitted to vendors?
The logic here is that if your prospect does not have any of the pain you can fix, it does not make sense for you to spend your valuable time talking with them, as they really do not need what you have and are unlikely to purchase from you. If you list the pain points you fix when building your script, you can develop a question for each, which can help you uncover pain points in your cold call.
Share common pain examples
There is a good chance you will make it through the pre-qualifying portion of your cold call script, and the prospect will not share any pain with you. Not to worry, as we can use one more tactic to try to uncover pain, and that is to simply share some examples of pain that other customers or prospects have shared with you, and then ask them if they have seen any of those.
Here is how to apply this to your cold call script:
Oh I see. Well, a lot of operations managers that I speak with often complain about there often being errors in the orders, it is time consuming to review nightly orders, and that it is hard to order the right amount of materials.
Are those things you can relate to at all?
When you do this, you throw some examples at them and look for their agreement or acknowledgment of any of them. You will get responses in the form of “yes” or “no.” If you get something close to “yes,” you can then drill down to ask which one and learn more about it.
SalesScripter helps sales pros to build a cold call script that uncovers pain.
