In this video, we discuss how to sales takeaway on cold calls.

 

What Is the Sales Takeaway

In order to know how to sales takeaway on cold calls, it can first help to clearly outline what exactly the sales takeaway is. The sales takeaway is taking away what you are trying to sell.

This is basically the opposite of what you probably do most of the time when selling a product, which is always trying to get the prospect interested and moving forward. With a sales takeaway, you are going in the other direction by expressing doubt about how much the prospect fits with or needs what you sell.

 

The Soft Sales Takeaway

Applying the sales takeaway to cold calling, since we are talking to the prospect for the first time and it is a very brief interaction, there might not be a lot of scenarios where we use a full sales takeaway. Instead, we can use what I refer to as a soft sales takeaway, which is a very soft expression of doubt used to perform a very slight takeaway at different moments of the cold call.

Here are some examples of a soft sales takeaway:

I do not know if you need what we provide.
I do not know if you are a good fit with what we do.
I do not know if we can help you in the same way.
I do not know if you are interested in those improvements.
I do not know if you are concerned about those areas.
I do not know if you are the right person to speak with.
I do not know if it makes sense for us to talk.

 

When to Use the Soft Sales Takeaway

If you apply this sales tactic to our cold call process, there are three different places where you can use the soft sales takeaway.

Open the Call
You could do a very soft sales takeaway right when you open the call with something like this:

Hello, [Contact’s Name]. This is [Your Name] with [Your Company].

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

After the Purpose of the Call
You could also do a soft sales takeaway after you share the purpose for the call with something like:

Great. The reason for my call is that we help sales trainers to:

Make it easier to teach sales reps what to say and ask
Decrease new hire ramp-up time
Improve how reps perform
Make the training department look great

I don’t know if those are areas that you want to improve.

Pain Points
You could also share a soft sales takeaway right before you share some of the pain points you help with by saying something like this:

Well, it sounds like you guys are doing pretty good over there. I am not sure if you all need our help or not. Before I completely close the file, let me ask you one last thing.

We work with a lot of sales trainers and they often have challenges with:

Difficult teaching reps everything they need to say
Takes a long time to get reps ramped up and producing
Training does not get enough credit

Are you concerned about any of those areas?

We hope this helps you with the sales takeaway on cold calls.