Prepare Your Salespeople By Drafting Call Scripts (FREE RESOURCE)

Marketing is all about planning ahead. You want to plan for the expected and the unexpected so that your business can handle whatever comes its way. Call scripts enable you to do that.

Let us demonstrate why this is important.

To promote one of your new service offerings, you decide to run a promotional campaign that offers the service at a discounted rate for the first month if they sign up using a promo code you provided via your marketing efforts. You sent out multiple direct mail pieces, put an ad in your newsletter, promoted it via social media, and sent out two different emails to ensure that your leads are well informed about your promotion.

To add another touch point, you decide to have your sales team call up the recipients of your previous marketing efforts. But, your sales rep you put in charge of the calls has no luck, and the people he called - some of who are current clients - are somewhat annoyed at your company for bothering them with something they don’t believe is relevant to their business. Other clients are confused: your sales rep was unable to answer a lot of the questions they had, and gave them conflicting information than what was on the marketing pieces they received.

Because of this, your promotion suffered. This situation would have been better if you prepared call scripts.

The Basics of Call Scripts

Call scripts, also known as sales scripts or cold calling scripts, are a prescribed set of talking points to use when speaking to prospects. They can help guide a conversation with that prospect, creating a general outline.

Call scripts are not meant to be read verbatim like some people believe. Doing so will make you should robotic, and as if you’re talking at your prospect instead of having an actual conversation. They’re instead meant to be an outline of the main talking points so that your sales rep doesn’t forget to relay any important information. Information that is personalized to the caller should be included if you want the call to be successful.

Your script should not be pages and pages long. Again, it is an outline. In addition, you are calling these people up at a time they are not expecting, and these people are likely busy running their business. You need to keep things short, sweet, and on topic, unless there is an indication from the person on the phone that they would like to talk to you for an extended period of time. Try to keep the call on topic.

The general format for a call script for the previous scenario should be:

• Introduction: Say your name and the company you work with, paired with a general greeting.
• Context: This is why you’re calling. In the case of the example discussed previously, you should frame the context around asking if the prospect received your marketing materials. Framing it this way is preferable because it makes your call feel like less of a cold call.
• General Information / Value Proposition: Here, you provide them some general information about what you are calling about. If you want to successfully sell your new service to this prospect, focus on how the service will benefit their company specifically. Note that if they did already look at your marketing materials, they will already know some information about the promotion you are offering. Therefore, you can shorten what you are going to say and just cover the key aspects in a few sentences.
• Questions: Ask the person if they have any questions about what you told them. In terms of planning for this, make sure your salesperson is made fully aware about how you structured your campaign (the marketing pieces sent out, the stipulations of the promotion, etc.) so they can answer questions based on that. To help, your team could brainstorm questions that the prospect would likely have, and have some answers planned out ahead of time.
• The “Ask”: Finally, if the person is still on the line, you ask if they would be interested in your offer. If they are: great! Then, you go through the process of signing them up for that service. If not, then you go through this process with the next person on your call list.

Remember, you’re not going to make it to the end of your script on every call: anywhere in this process, the client may say that they’re not interested. Your salesperson has to be prepared for that at any point in the call, and handle things professionally without fumbling over their words. When that happens, you thank them for their time, tell them to have a nice day, and then move onto the next caller on the list.

Achieving Success with Your Next Campaign

To help your next campaign run smoothly, we have created a generalized call script to get you started that you can modify to your liking. Complete the form to download your FREE copy!