When you’re cold calling into different industries, it can be difficult to have any level of industry expertise. When your prospect list spans dozens of different industries, there simply isn’t enough time in the day to become an expert in each one. That makes it almost impossible to gain deep, meaningful knowledge of any of the businesses in terms of how they operate, current trends, the competitive landscape, and industry-specific terminology.

A Shortcut: Create Industry Talking Points

The trick here is to create a list of talking points for each industry. This will allow you to sound more like an industry expert and insider without having to spend hours doing research.

You may think, “How am I going to create industry-related talking points without industry knowledge?” The answer to that is that we have a sales message brainstorming process that will allow you to create these talking points without having a deep level of knowledge.

We are able to do that because we are not creating extremely deep and technical thoughts and explanations. We are just creating high-level things to say and ask that build off your existing product knowledge. These talking points will make you sound like you understand the prospect’s business, helping you to create more engaging conversations, build interest, uncover needs, and generate qualified leads.

 

The 6-Step Industry Message Framework

Here’s the six-step brainstorming process I use to create mini-industry playbooks for cold calling:

1. Product

Start with the product or service you’re selling. For this example, we’ll use Workforce Management Software.

2. Target Industry

Select the specific industry you’re tailoring the message for (e.g., healthcare, manufacturing, logistics). We will be using the hospital industry.

3. Benefits

List the top benefits your product delivers to companies in that industry. These should be improvements that resonate specifically with that vertical. Here are some examples of how our product helps hospitals:

  • Improve the quality of care by optimizing the staffing of resources
  • Decrease the complexity of scheduling staff, skills, and certifications
  • Minimize overtime and labor costs through efficient management of available resources

4. Pain Points

Identify the industry-specific problems your solution helps to solve. Here are problems our product can help with:

  • Difficult to schedule the correct number of resources, skills, and certifications
  • Patient care will be directly impacted by the quality of schedules created
  • Overtime and labor costs can be higher than needed resources aren’t scheduled correctly

5. Questions

Create questions you can ask during the cold call to identify whether the prospect has those pain points. Here are some questions to ask:

  • How difficult is it to create schedules that have the proper coverage of resources, skills, and certifications?
  • How much of a priority is it to improve the quality of care?
  • How often do you feel that you either have too many or too few resources scheduled?

6. Customer Example

Include a short example or case study of how your product has helped a similar company in the same industry.

Customer: Regional hospital
Problem: Did not have good shift coverage
Product: Employee Scheduling Software
First improvement: They were able to create optimized schedules.
Second improvement: Improved quality of care and decreased labor costs at the same time

Putting It All Together

Each of these steps creates what we call building blocks, and you can mix and match your building blocks to create your cold call script. You can open with your value proposition, transition to asking some questions, and discuss some pain points. And all of these talking points and questions are aligned with the industry, making you sound like an expert and insider, for all of the different industries you cold call into.

We hope this helps you with cold calling into different industries!