The best cold call script is the one that allows you to book a meeting at the highest percentage rate. When you are making a cold call, your single goal is a meeting, nothing more, nothing less. Even though the right words are critically important, the best approach is made up of four principles that, when followed, improve your results.
The Best Cold Call Script Is Other-Oriented
For a very long time, maybe forty years, cold callers have been trained to use language choices that are self-oriented, meaning they are more about the salesperson and their company than they are about the prospective client. The person calling their potential buyer is seeking an appointment, but their language suggests the call will mostly be about them.
The poor language suggests to your prospective B2B buyer that you are going to talk about you, your company, and your solutions. An approach that projects that the call is going to be all about you gives your client the impression that you are going to be pitching them, reducing your chances of acquiring a meeting. When you say you’d like to “stop by” and “introduce myself” and “tell you about my company” and “how we are helping people just like you,” you have made an inadequate offer.
The better language would be other-oriented. Instead of focusing so much on you, focus on your client and the benefit of the meeting.
One of the most useful ways to think about being other-oriented in your request for a meeting is to think about “selling the meeting.” Why should your dream client meet with you now? How do they benefit from giving you their time?
Now to the next principle, the Trading Value Rule.
The Best Cold Call Script Trades Value for Time
You have to trade something of value with your contacts in exchange for their time. As more businesses are striving to do less with more, people are less willing to give their time to salespeople who don’t have something valuable to offer. Many people at the highest level of authority find themselves working long after what would have once been considered “regular work hours,” with more incoming messages and requests than they could handle in two lifetimes.
When you think about “selling the meeting,” you have to think in terms of competitive displacement. Usually, the words “competitive displacement” mean replacing your competitor from their current role as your prospect’s vendor (or strategic partner, if they are good enough to be considered such). The sales script you use for prospecting needs to displace the hundreds of other things your dream client might do with their time.
If you promise to share your insights, discuss the trends impacting their business and your analysis, or share with them some changes to the ways things are being done to produce better results, you are offering something of value. When you combine an other-orientation with trading value, you increase the power of your sales language and improve your odds of getting a yes.
Whether or not you are other-oriented and trading value is measured by whether or not your prospective client is in a better position than before they gave you their time—even if they never buy from you.
The Best Cold Call Script Positions You
The best cold call script will also position you as consultative, as someone with the business acumen and situational knowledge to help solve their client’s problems, point out new opportunities, and assist them in improving their results. When we are at our very best in B2B sales, we care enough about other people to create value for them.
Your language choices in sales need to provide strong evidence that you have the knowledge and experience to help, something the weak words mentioned earlier fail to do. The hard truth about selling well today is that you are the value proposition, especially when what you are selling is the first meeting. Your potential client’s primary question isn’t why they should meet with your company, but why they should meet with you.
You can position yourself by leveraging the overall knowledge and experience of your company. Use insight selling language like, “I’ll share with you what we believe to be the most important trends that are going to have the biggest impact over the next eighteen to twenty-four months and some of the things we see working now.”
You only need two things to be a trusted advisor. The first is trust, and the second is advice. If you don’t study your industry and the intersection with your client’s industry, you lack the information to make the kind of pitch in the previous paragraph.
The Best Cold Call Script Anticipates Objections
There is only one objection to a meeting, and this is true no matter what words your contact uses to express it. The single objection when boiled down is their belief that meeting with you is a waste of their time. You can assume this is true and act accordingly.
The person you are calling accepted meeting requests in the past, only to be disappointed with the result—or the lack thereof. They were disappointed, and they regretted saying yes very soon after the salesperson showed up in their office. Everyone in consultative sales is paying for the sins of our sisters and brothers who showed up without creating any value for their prospective clients.
You need to be able to express to your contact that you understand their time is valuable and that you will not waste one minute of the time they have given you. The right sales language might sound like, “Even if there is no next step for me, the ideas we share are worth your time, and I won’t waste one minute.” Some of your prospects need to hear you say those words before they trust you are worth their time.
Sales Approach
If insight-based selling is going to be your approach, your cold call sales script needs to start with your insights, ideas, and your view of your prospective client’s business and what they should be doing differently.
