It can be tough to be organized and prepared when cold calling. Cold calls are brief, fast-paced, and you never really know where the conversation will go, as there’s a lot to discuss.
But in this video and blog post, I share a method that solves all of that and makes you sharp and prepared, regardless of where the call goes.
Step 1 – Create Buckets for Talking Points
First, we will get organized by putting our talking points into a few different buckets. Here are a few buckets I recommend you create:
- Product/Company Info: Key details about your product and company
- Benefits: The benefits your product delivers
- Pain Points: Common pain points your product or service helps to solve
- Questions: Create a list of good questions to ask
- Customer Example: A short story of a customer your product helped
Creating these buckets and organizing your talking points by itself will immediately help you to be organized and prepared when cold calling.
Step 2 – Create a Cold Call Outline
Once you have your buckets of talking points, you can very easily put those in a particular order to create an outline of what to discuss during the cold call. Here is one way to organize the buckets we created in the previous tip:
- Open with your value proposition
- Ask questions
- Share examples of pain points
- Introduce the product and company
- Share a story of a customer
A couple of things to keep in mind with this outline. First, this is just one way to organize these buckets. There are many different ways to organize these buckets or blocks. For example, you could open by sharing pain points if those are more attention-grabbing. Or you could open your cold calls by sharing a short story of a customer you helped. Or it might make sense to talk about your product right out of the gate.
Another thing to keep in mind with the outline is that you do not need to go through the buckets in the exact order they are listed in. In fact, the best way to use this outline is to bounce between the blocks in whatever order makes the most sense according to how the prospect is responding.
This structure will help you to be much more organized and prepared through the chaos that can be experienced during cold calls.
Step 3 – Use Buckets for Objection Responses
View the call outline we just created as “Plan A.” This is what we want to discuss if everything goes our way during a call. But as you know, things never go according to plan when cold calling, and that is because you will always face objections.
But here is the really cool thing – we can use the same buckets from our call outline as responses to many of the common sales objections. If the prospect says they are not interested, we can deflect by asking a pain question. If the prospect says they are already using someone today, we can deflect to our current state questions.
What these buckets allow us to do is create a “Plan B” for what to say when the prospect tries to derail our Plan A by giving us a sales objection.
Hopefully, these three steps will take you to the next level in terms of your level of preparation and organization when cold calling.
