Cold calling is the technique in which a potential customer is contacted without any prior interaction with the salesperson. Cold calls are an immensely effective tool for outreach and closing deals. Writing a cold calling script is challenging enough, but knowing how to write a cold calling script that is personalized according to your business and customers is nearly impossible. Fortunately, we’ve got you covered in this regard. Create your cold-calling sales scripts that actually work for closing deals.

Why Are Cold Calling Scripts Created?

1. Cold calling scripts are like routines. Knowledge of enough scripts will make you ready for any kind of questions or hurdles that the potential customers might throw at you. That does not mean you’ll be like an unthinking robot, repeating the same things in every sales call.
2. A lot of people think that cold calling scripts will cripple them and hold them back from their natural creativity. That is not the case here. While you might be confident about being able to think on the fly, these scripts act as general guidelines and tools to enable you for having valuable conversations with your prospects consistently.
3. These scripts also help you in the time management of the call. This lets you concentrate on the prospects’ most relevant questions. You can control the focus of your call by creating cold-calling sales scripts. This also allows you to separate the serious prospects from the not-so-serious ones.
4. The cold calling scripts help in making the salesmen more confident by informing them about the possible situations that may occur during a sales call.
5. Cold calling sales scripts are just like thinking about how your call is going to advance before making that call. Only when you’re preparing your sales script on paper, you’re just making it better.

Preparations Before The Sales Call

Cold calling is not you calling some prospects and winging the sales pitch. It’s all about planning and execution. So, before calling your leads you need to do some prep work first.

Define The Goal Of Your Cold Call

You need to start by defining the goal of your sales call. This goal is to usually secure an appointment. Oftentimes, salespeople make it seem like they are asking for the buyer to immediately make a buying or a hiring decision. The prospects are usually not willing to do that in a 5-minute call. What you have to do is conspicuously state in your cold calling sales script that you are not here for their decision on whether they want to buy your product or hire you or not, you’re here to secure an appointment that will bring you closer to the sale.

Pick Some Verticals

You can’t call everyone and anyone. This will just lead to wasting your time and effort. So, to cherry-pick who you’ll call, you need to identify 2-3 verticals to target. Identify your best customers, the ones you’ve had the most success cold calling, and look for common attributes in them. Take finance and banking as an example. You could pick these two as your targeted verticals. Your verticals could also be hospitality and retail. If you target the right verticals, you’ll attract more suitable leads that will potentially lead to more customers.

Identify A List Of Prospects

As now you know who your potential customers are, start building a list of prospects before you start to create cold calling sales scripts. LinkedIn is the perfect tool that can help you with identifying your prospects from a myriad of search options. Search according to industry, location, job title, mutual connections, and everything you need to identify your target leads.

Also, before preparing your prospect list, keep in mind these 3 questions,

• What is the problem that we solve?
• Why do I think the prospect is suffering from this problem?
• Why do I think the prospect wants to solve that problem?

Remember that, some prospects might have the same problem that you solve, but if they are not interested in solving the said problem, you can’t count them as prospects.

Research About Every Prospect

Now, this step might be time-consuming and you’d rather go off calling a bunch of prospects. But trust us, a little bit of research can push your success rate to a whole different level.

When you’re on LinkedIn, search for the following things of your prospect to personalize your approach.

• A fun fact about them.
• What is the purpose of this company and what it does?
• Which position your prospect is in and what does he/she specifically do?
• If you’ve helped a company similar to it in the past?
• How to pronounce their name correctly. Nothing is more annoying to a prospect than a fast-talking salesperson butchering their name. So, make sure you know how to pronounce their name correctly. Some projects add how to pronounce their names on Facebook and LinkedIn or if you don’t find it there, use PronounceNames.com to get an idea.

Now let’s get into exactly how to create cold-calling sales scripts that are personalized for your prospects.

How To Create Cold Calling Sales Scripts

Don’t Write A Monologue

As we’ve said in the beginning, having a cold calling script does not mean you will copy the entire thing in your cold call. When you write a monologue, paragraph after paragraph, you’re doing exactly that. The reasons why you shouldn’t write a monologue is because:

• This puts the salesperson in a situation where he/she does all the talking. Whereas, a great sales script is what gets the prospect talking more than the salesperson.
• The prospects can throw an unexpected question or objection out of the blue. In this situation, the salesperson won’t be prepared for it and likely won’t be able to answer the question on the fly without any prior preparation
• A lengthy monologue is created for the sole purpose of building interest among the prospects for the salesperson’s company. But this makes the entire sales script about the salesperson and not about the prospects. This results in them losing any interest altogether.
• This creates a ton of verbiage for the salesperson to memorize and deliver the entire thing. As such, they’ll either not adapt it, or adapt it but perform poorly. The cold calling script needs to be easy to incorporate and use.

Introduce Yourself

Your prospect is likely a very busy person. So try to introduce yourself fast in the first 10 seconds of your cold-calling sales script. But make sure it’s not too fast. If you start with, ‘Hello, this is ---- from ------’ and the prospect goes ‘What, you’re who?’, it’s game over already. Give your prospect a little time to analyze the situation. Then move straight to the main purpose of your call. An average person speaks 13o words per minute, so you should have approximately 20-30 words to speak your purpose. remember that, your purpose is to form a bond with the prospect.

Here are some ways to inform the best possible opener:

Research, Identify, And Touch On Their Pain points

Research about what your prospects’ major pain points are and how your company can alleviate them. Also, mention to them how your company solved these very pain points of other companies that your prospects are facing. Here is an example. Suppose our prospect is having issues with managing their emails for outreach. OutreachBin is an email sending software that’ll alleviate this problem. Our prospects can hyper-personalize hundreds of emails, automatically close sales without ever missing a follow-up, increase deliverability, and save time by automating their entire email game through OutreachBin. So, once we explain to them the value of our product and how effectively it can overcome their pain points, they will surely want to move forward.

Sell Your Value As Early As You Can

Provide them examples of how your company performed before with other clients and establish rapport. Ask them if they want to replicate the same success for their company.

Create An Outline Format

By breaking down the cold calling sales script into sections, you’ll be able to better focus on your script. As you can jump from one section to another and not go through the script beginning to end, you will be able to adjust to any circumstances that the prospect throws at you. You can create a basic outline of your pitch like this:

• Intro
• Establishing value
• Disqualify statement
• Questions to pre-qualify the prospect
• Common pain points
• Solution of their pain points through your product
• Name drop
• Asking for appointment

The key takeaway of this is to break down your speech into several sections and then pitch it.

Create Your Cold Calling Sales Scripts In Bullet Points

Now that you’ve broken down your script into several sections, write it down in bold letters as bullet points. What that would do is grab your attention when you’re in the call to make sure that you aren’t missing a section, as opposed to huge paragraphs that are hard to read and get a hold of.

Also, it’s very easy to take those bullet points and speak about them in your own words. This lets the conversation flow smoothly and makes you sound natural.

It also makes it easier to memorize the script. Because we all know it is way easier to memorize bullet points than huge paragraphs.

Validate The Need Of Your Product

• You need to create the perfect question to validate the need for your product to the prospect. Then by selling through curiosity, you need to pique their interest further.
• Ask them open-ended questions so that they don’t get a chance to say no. These questions also create an opportunity for them to do most of the talking and people love to talk about themselves. The more you know about your prospects and their companies, the more likely you are of making the sale.
• According to a study by Going, we found that 11-14 questions are the perfect number as 15-18 questions are slightly more effective than 7-10. Ask questions related to their aims and major pain points: What problems are you facing currently? Where do you want to see your company in the next 2 years? What is your idea of a successful outcome?
• Search for common objections to be able to predict your prospects' next move. Plan as many scenarios as possible to set the call-up.
• Listen to your prospects’ objection and redirect with a value statement or qualifying question. Here, value statements don’t mean the features of your product but how your product can solve its issues.
• If they come up with a new objection that you haven’t heard before, write it down to be better prepared for the future.
• If they flat out reject your proposal either because your product isn’t a good fit or your prospect is busy, take away something from that call.

Here are some common takeaways:

1. Ask if they know anyone that may be interested in your product.
2. Ask them if you could follow up anytime. If yes, when?
3. Ask them the reason why they declined your offering so that you can better perform in the future.

Provide Your Credentials, Examples, And Establish Value

Value Proposition

Provide solutions on how your product would alleviate their common issues. In this stage, speak to them like a human being, with user-friendly, jargon-free terms so that it’s easy for them to understand.

Give Credentials And Examples

Provide them with specific credentials with examples of how your products helped clients like your prospect in the past. Prospects don’t buy vague terms. The examples that you provide to them only belong to you and that’s why they’re very powerful. Speak 2-3 sentences in this regard.

Ask For An Appointment As A Closing

Now, keep the ending simple. If your prospect is still talking to you at this point, he/she will likely agree with your proposal to arrange a meeting. If they agree to solve their problem with your product, ask them to set aside a time for this and arrange an appointment.

This stage could go either of two ways:

1. Your prospect will agree to the appointment.
2. Your prospect will come up with an objection.

It’s a win-win situation either way.