In this video, we discuss creating questions for cold calling. To help with that, we use a sample from a cold call recording with a real salesperson. In that call, the salesperson asks:

  • Wanted to see how you guys were doing over there?
  • Any projects planned for this year that you wanted some assistance hiring for?
  • Do you have any plans at all for this for this year?

While I give the salesperson credit for asking questions, there is room for improvement, which provides a good opportunity to discuss creating questions for cold calling.

 

Two Categories of Questions

At Sales Scripter, we talk about a lot of different categories of questions you should ask. But only two of those categories are what you need to focus on when creating questions for cold calling, and those are pain questions and current state questions.

 

Creating Pain Questions

Pain questions are questions that probe for the pain points your product or service helps your customers to resolve, minimize, or avoid. And to show you an example of what these look like, we can go back to the recording of a salesperson cold calling and trying to sell recruiting services.

To create pain questions, we can look at the pain points the product or service helps with and create a question for each point that probes to see if that is a concern for the prospect. Here is a list of pain points created for this salesperson:

  • Takes a long time to fill open positions
  • Hiring the wrong people is extremely costly
  • Time-consuming to properly find, screen, and interview applicants
    \Difficult to determine which applicant to hire and make the right decisions

Once we have those pain points, creating questions for cold calling is very easy, and here is a question for each point:

  • How do you feel about the amount of time it takes to fill open positions?
  • How important is it to decrease the time to fill open positions?
  • How important is it to improve the quality of applicants you are hiring?
  • How important is it to decrease the amount of time you spend interviewing?

 

Creating Current State Questions

A second type of question to create is a current state question, which are questions to learn more about what the prospect is doing in the area where your product fits. These questions will be different for every product or service, and here are some questions for this salesperson:

  • What is your process for filling open positions?
  • How often do you need to fill open positions?
  • Do you currently have open positions that you need to fill?
  • How many positions are you needing to fill?
  • Do you use internal staff for recruiting?
  • Are you working with a recruiter or staffing agency?
  • How happy are you with the quality of candidates you are interviewing? Top-caliber talent?
  • How long does it usually take to fill open positions?
  • When was the last time you considered making changes or improving your recruiting process?
  • Do you feel like you have the internal resources and processes that are needed to get positions filled quickly and with the right caliber talent?

We hope this gives you good ideas for creating questions for cold calling!