Sales Calls: The 5 Key Pillars of Stellar Phone Scripts

Sales Calls: The 5 Key Pillars of Stellar Phone Scripts

When you’re on a sales call, you have a limited amount of time to grab your lead’s attention and engage. It can be a unique dance. You don’t want to sound pushy, frantic, or robotic, but you can’t afford to be passive either. Your clients are humans looking for a human interaction, and the first few seconds of a call can mean the difference between a sale or a fail. 

…No pressure.

Lucky for you, we’ve put together the five key pillars of building stellar phone scripts. These points will serve as the “good bones” of every call you make, which you can then flesh out, customize, and modify with skill in real-time depending on your specific customer and their response.

Get ready to encourage engagement and win a positive response from your prospect…#LikeABoss. 

• 1. Do Your Research 

It’s proven science: we love talking about ourselves. You can use this to your advantage when making a sale call. 

You want to ask questions and develop a quick rapport. And this works best when you have some background information about who you are calling.

A little research goes a long way. When you have a prospect, be it focused on an individual or a company as a whole, a bit of good ol’ professional cyber-stalking is perfectly acceptable. This benefits you in two ways:

• You have some personal or behind-the-scenes information you can weave into your phone scripts.
• Your prospect immediately knows you cared enough to take the time to invest in them personally, which makes an excellent first impression. 

LinkedIn is a great resource for professional investigation. You can get a lot of helpful information in one location all at once. Company/personal descriptions, posts, comments, etc…all these can be used to get to know your prospect before you even get them on the phone.

Once you do make that call, you can open with a connecting line to build rapport and make the call feel more like an authentic conversation, rather than a sale.

Example:

“Hello, this is (your name) from (company). 

Hey, congratulations on your promotion! How is the new position going so far?”

Be respectful of their time and feel out the response. If they seem open to continuing the conversation, ask a short follow-up question. If not, move on. 

• 2. Emphasize the Problem

As humans, the urgency of solving a problem and avoiding pain or discomfort can be the most motivating factor of all. We are constantly searching for answers to problems, whether that’s simply the question of “what’s for dinner,” or something more serious such as how to revamp a marketing strategy. 

So when you’re building your phone scripts, a strong way to start is to address your prospect’s pain points directly. Use your knowledge of the industry and the research you’ve done on the company or individual in particular to determine what the most crucial pain point is that you are trying to resolve. Bonus points if you can do this in the form of an open-ended question to keep the conversation flowing and your prospective customer talking! 

If you’re unsure of your prospect’s pain point, ask them. This is another great way to keep a conversation going with a pertinent question that peaks their interest, and helps you tie it together into a more personalized pitch. 

Example: “What would you say are your company’s greatest challenges when it comes to reengaging reluctant shoppers?” 

• 3. Offer a Solution

This is where the real work of sales comes in. With pain points fresh and raw in their mind, your prospect will be feeling sad and uncomfortable, and want a remedy. This is your moment, your time to shine with the wonders of your product or services.

This can be done a few different ways.

• Highlight compelling benefits. 
• Share some impressive statistics, and show what makes you different from your competition. 
• Draw them in with a real-life example of another person or company who shared similar issues as your prospect, and show how your product or service changed their life for the better. 

Try to have around 3 key benefits of your offer catering to the pain points that your prospect has shared or you have uncovered with your mad cyber-stalking skillz. 

• 4. Paint a Vision of the Result

With your prospect’s interest piqued, you can solidify that interest by painting a rosy picture of what their situation would look like if they moved forward with your product or services. Problems will be solved. Life will be better. Their job will be easier. Their cereal will never get soggy and every social media post they create will go viral.

…Maybe not quite that magical, but you get the picture.

What is to gain from saying yes? What would be the cost of saying no to your offer? FOMO can be a strong motivator, especially if it means “missing out” on things as significant as increased revenue, a streamlined business process, or quality of life.

Following a problem, solution, and result pattern is a solid formula to build your phone scripts around. It is compelling and effective. Everyone wants to save time, money, and energy, and if you are offering them a way to do just that, they will engage. 

• 5. Always Close With a Call to Action

A strong close is the anchor of your phone scripts. Even as you move through your introduction, pain points, offer of a solution, and vision of a bright future, it is all tethered by the goal of a strong call to action. To put it simply, the whole point of your call is to sell your close.

Ideally, your intended close should be something that is easy for your prospect to say yes to. For example, if you are selling a particular product, and you have a killer demo available, it might be easier to just “sell” the demo. Saying yes to a demo is a low-pressure commitment, and if your demo is thorough and gives them everything they need, don’t waste that time during your initial sales call. Let the demo speak for itself. 

 Whether you close a sale or not, you can adjust your call to action to still secure a win. For a cold call, this might be as simple as scheduling a follow-up call, or gaining 3 more minutes of your prospect’s time. 

Trust the Experts

The sales process can be a time-consuming and arduous task for any company. It’s not uncommon for companies to outsource much of their sales and marketing process to an experienced business partner, like Squeeze. 

We take the time to get to know you, your company, and your clients, so our skilled reps can effectively take on those pesky sales calls and transfer qualified prospects back to you hot and ready for closing.

If you’re eager to make the most of your marketing budget, optimize your sales process, and increase revenue, contact us today. We’re ready to take your sales calls to the next level.