In this video, we provide an example of cold calling small business owners. The salesperson appears to sell some type of business process outsourcing that helps to simplify or improve accounts payable and accounts receivable.

 

Sharing the Value Proposition

While this example of cold calling small business owners might sound like a not-so-great cold call, I think there are a lot of things she did very well. First, in her opening and stating the purpose of the call, she shares her value proposition.

I just wanted to see what you guys were doing to save money regarding your accounts payable process.

Although, as you can see from the call, there is tremendous room for improvement with her value proposition because I did not have any idea what she was talking about. And you could say that this confusion was because we do not have an accounts payable and accounts receivable processes, but I would bet that even a prospect that did have those processes would also not know what she is talking about.

 

Explain With the Pain Points

When I did not know what she was talking about in this example of cold calling small business owners, she tried to clear that up by sharing the pain points that her service helps to fix.

Typically owners that we work with say that they have a pretty intensive AP process, AR process.
And they’re looking for a way to automate that.

I think this is great, and when the prospect does not understand what you sell, a very efficient and effective way of clearing that up can be to share the problems that your product or service helps to solve.

But similar to her value proposition, there is probably room for improvement with the pain points that she shares.

 

Building a Better Message

I took the script that this salesperson used in this example of cold calling small business owners and put it into our sales message brainstorming process and was able to improve her value proposition to this:

We help small business owners to:

  • Simplify AP and AR processes
  • Decrease time spent dealing with AP and AR
  • Decrease time to receive payments
  • Decrease delinquent payments

I am not saying that these points are perfect, but you should be able to see how it is better than her value proposition

I was then able to improve her pain points to these:

A lot of small business owners we work with have challenges with about:

  • AP and AR can be intensive processes
  • AP and AR can be time-consuming and labor-intensive
  • Takes too much time to get customers to pay
  • Large amount of AP is never recovered

We can then use those pain points to create these pain questions:

  • How do you feel about the current AP/AR processes?
  • How important is it to spend less time on AP/AR?
  • How helpful would it be to get customers to pay faster?
  • How important is it to decrease delinquent customers?

 

I hope this example of cold calling small business owners helps give you some ideas for your sales prospecting!