There are 3 key things that you can include in your cold call script that can take it from good to great.

1. Value Statement
A cold call is very challenging in that you need to do a lot in a very short period of time. You need to grab the prospect’s attention and also tell them what you are calling about or why they should talk to you. What we often do is focus on the latter and the way that our natural instincts tell us to do that is by talking about our products and services. This can look like this:

Hi, I am with Smith Industries. We provide business intelligence software.

The problem with some variations of this is that it does not grab the prospect’s attention, especially if the prospect is not shopping for (or aware that they need) what you are selling. They might not even know what you are talking about and the time you have on a cold call is typically not enough to explain it.

Another way to go in your cold call script is to deliver a value statement instead. This is a one-sentence statement that mentions the value that your product delivers. For example:

Hi, I am with Smith Industries. We help businesses to make better decisions by have better visibility into their operation.

2. Disqualify Statement
When the prospect answers your call, their guardedness will be at a medium level. Everything thing that you do and say will either make this guard increase or decrease. To have a really effective cold call script, you want to be able to decrease their guardedness right away.

A really easy and powerful way to do this is to include a disqualify statement. This is a statement that expresses doubt in it making sense to talk. For example:

I am not sure if you are the right person to speak with.

Or

I am not sure if you all need what we provide.

One of the reasons this is so powerful is that it is the exact opposite of what most salespeople do in that they always push the prospect to move forward and this essentially does a mini-takeaway and will immediately decrease the prospect’s guardedness

3. Name Drop
Another way to decrease the prospect’s guardedness is to make them feel like you are more of a friend than a foe. A friend is someone already engaged with the company. A foe will be an outsider trying to work their way to get in.

A really easy way to immediately give the prospect a feeling that you are a friend is to name-drop other individuals that you have spoken with. If you have not spoken with anyone, name-drop someone that you are planning to talk with. For example:

I met with Mary Thomas in accounting last week and she mentioned that I should reach out to you.

Or

I am planning on talking with Mary Thomas in accounting and I wanted to speak with you before talking with her.

 

SalesScripter provides tools that help sales pros build a cold call script.