Here are ten cold calling tips that are guaranteed to take you to the next level.
- Don’t Lead with Your Product
- Focus on the Value You Deliver
- Avoid the “All About Me” Trap
- Talk about the prospect’s pain points
- Ask the Right Questions
- Sell the Conversation, Not the Product
- Find a Reason to Continue the Conversation
- Create a Cold Call Script Outline
- Be Ready for Objections
- Practice Makes Progress
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 backfire.
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 delivers 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 of all the prospect’s challenges; you want to focus on the pain points where your product or service fits.
To improve your ability to get prospects talking about their pain points, you need clarity on which pain points or challenges you help solve, minimize, or avoid. And to help you gain that clarity, start by making a list of the pain points your product helps with.
5. Ask the Right Questions
The best way to get prospects to talk about their pain points is to ask 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 in the previous tip and, for each pain point, create a question to ask to see how the prospect is doing in that 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 to focusing more on selling the prospect on simply talking and having a conversation. This is important to stop and 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 on selling the product by asking prospects whether they need or are interested in it.
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 on closing the prospect to talking more, the best way to become a better closer is to get good at finding a reason to keep talking. The pain questions we created in tip 5 will help with this because, if we design them correctly, they should help us find prospects facing the challenges we can help with.
When we uncover that 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 cover and what to 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 these 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 also boost 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 a response prepared and ready when these come up. And the really cool thing is that we can use the blocks from our cold call outline to respond to many of the most common objections.
If the prospect asks what it is regarding, 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 keep cold calls going, but they can also help reduce 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 use to practice your cold calls, and I will include a link to a free trial in the description below.
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Cold calling doesn’t have to be a struggle. With these ten cold calling tips, you can build confidence, start more productive conversations, and ultimately, close more deals.
