If you’re new to cold calling, the idea of picking up the phone and calling strangers can be intimidating. But with the right approach, you can dramatically improve your results. Here are ten cold calling tips for beginners that will make the process easier and help you close more deals.
1. Don’t Lead with Your Product
When you’re new to sales, your instinct is to introduce yourself, your company, and your product right away. But this “product-selling” approach often triggers immediate resistance. Prospects have been conditioned to tune out salespeople, so leading with your product can work against you.
Instead, focus on creating curiosity and building rapport before diving into what you sell. Save the product talk for later in the call—after you’ve earned the right to have a real conversation.
2. Focus on the Value You Deliver
If you’re not talking about your product, what should you talk about? Shift your message to the value your product delivers. Instead of saying
I’m with SalesScripter, and we provide an AI-powered sales script generator.
try:
The reason for my call is that I help businesses get more out of their sales teams by helping them generate more leads.
Talking about value connects with what your prospects care about, and it positions you as a problem-solver rather than a product-pusher.
To implement this, brainstorm a list of benefits your product or service helps to deliver to your customers.
3. Avoid the “All About Me” Trap
Product-focused cold calls tend to revolve around the salesperson:
This is my company.
This is what we sell.
Do you need it?
That’s not a conversation—that’s a pitch. A better approach is to ask thoughtful questions that shift the focus to the prospect and their situation.
4. Talk about the prospect’s pain points
If we are going to talk about the prospect, the most productive thing to discuss is the areas where they are having challenges or where there is room for improvement. And to do this right, you don’t want to have a broad discussion about all of the prospect’s challenges; you want to focus the discussion on the pain points in the area where your product or service fits.
In order to improve your ability to get prospects talking about their pain points, you need to have clarity on what pain points or challenges you help to solve, minimize, or avoid. And in order for you to have that clarity, start by making a list of pain points your product helps with.
5. Ask the Right Questions
The best way to get prospect’s talking about their pain points is by asking good questions. You might agree with that but not know what questions to ask.
The trick here is that we can take the list of pain points we came up with on the previous tip, and for each pain point, we can create a question to ask to see how the prospect is doing in that particular area. We refer to these as pain questions.
6. Sell the Conversation, Not the Product
The next tip is to shift from selling the product and focus more on selling the prospect on simply talking more and having a conversation. This is important to stop to think about and keep in mind because your natural instinct will be to try to sell your product during a cold call. Even if you can’t take the order right then, most salespeople still focus more on selling the product by asking prospects if they need or are interested in the product they sell.
There are many problems with this approach. The first being that the prospect is most likely not in buying mode at that exact moment, and this will increase the odds of facing objections like “I am not interested”, “we don’t need that right now”, and “we already use someone for that.” And another problem is that the purchase is not the next step in the sales process. In most cases, if we are going to move forward at all, the next step is to simply talk more and have a longer conversation.
7. Find a Reason to Continue the Conversation
If we are focusing more closing the prospect for talking more, the best way to become a better closer is to get good at finding a reason to talk more. The pain questions we created in tip 5 will help with this because, if we design them correctly, they should help us to find prospects who are having the challenges we can help with.
When we uncover a prospect has pain or room for improvement during a cold call, that creates a reason and justification for talking more, and we can use that when we close the prospect by saying something like:
Well, based on what you have shared. It might make sense to talk more because that is the type of thing that we help with.
Are you available next Tuesday or Thursday morning to have a call where I can share some examples of how we have helped other businesses that were in the same situation?
8. Create a Cold Call Script Outline
Create an outline of what to talk about and ask when talking with a prospect on a cold call. We can also use what we created from the previous tips for this outline.
These sets of talking points are what we call building blocks. And there are a few other blocks that you can create, but from just what we created with this tips, we have enough for a cold call outline because you can open with your value points to open the call, transition to ask pain questions, share pain points, and close when you find a prospect has needs or pain.
Having this outline will not only improve your performance, but it can also improve your confidence and reduce any cold call anxiety you might experience.
9. Be Ready for Objections
Objections are guaranteed to come up, regardless of how well you execute. And it can help tremendously to have some sort of response prepared and ready to go when these come up. And the really cool thing is that we can actually use the blocks from our cold call outline as responses to many of the most common objections.
The prospect asks what the is in regards to or if it is a sales call, respond with your value proposition. The prospect says they are not interested, deflect to one of your pain questions. The prospect asks you to send them your information, deflect back to your current state questions.
Not only do these responses help you to keep cold calls going, but they can also help to decrease how much you get beat up and your overall level of stress and frustration when cold calling.
10. Practice Makes Progress
And the last tip is to practice and role play your cold calls and objection handling. A professional athlete does not just jump into a game without warming up or practicing during the week. And you shouldn’t do that as a sales professional. Practicing and warming up beforehand will greatly improve your ability to know what to say and how to respond when it is game time.
If you like this tip but do not have anyone to practice with, we have an AI-powered sales simulator you can practice your cold calls with and I will put a link to free trial for that in the description below.
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Cold calling doesn’t have to be a struggle. With these ten cold calling tips for beginners, you can build confidence, start more productive conversations, and ultimately, close more deals.
