Building Interest While Making Cold Calls

In order to be successful while making cold calls, it is very important to build some level of interest with the sales prospect. The challenge with doing this is that there is a very limited amount of time to work with. As a result, you must be very efficient and effective with your approach to successfully build interest and there are some ways to improve consistency in this area.

Cold Call Script
If you want to become more effective at building interest while cold calling, it can be helpful to use some sort of cold call script. You do not have to read off of a script or say scripted statements word for word, but some sort of outline or structure can definitely be helpful.

The cold call script will provide the game plan for how you are going to trigger the interest. To achieve this, there is likely a certain mix of questions and statements that will get you there. You could just improvise based on your experience and knowledge and try to get the interest going or you could build a cold call script and use this as your game plan. An approach with a script will stand to drive better results while making cold calls.

Value Statement
Early in a cold call, you should deliver some sort of value statement. A value statement is one to two sentences that summarize how companies or individuals benefit from buying your products or services. The value statement is not a company overview or product description, but more a communication of value and benefits that transfer from you to your clients.

The value statement will build a little interest, but the purpose of the value statement is to build just enough interest so that you are able to grab the prospect's attention for a few minutes. The goal of the value statement is to build enough interest so that you buy yourself two to five minutes to execute your cold call.

Qualifying Questions
At some point in the cold call, it can be helpful to ask the prospect some qualifying questions. Not only will these questions help you to identify if you should spend your valuable time selling to the prospect, but they can also uncover pain if any exists.

In order to effectively build interest while making cold calls, it is important to uncover pain. By identifying what is not working well, you can then focus the remainder of the cold call in that particular area.

Connect Value with Pain
If you have delivered your value statement and have asked some qualifying questions to qualify and find some pain, you can now connect the pain you uncovered to the value statement to build a deeper level of interest. The goal here is to provide some summary points to build enough interest to get the first conversation.

These summary points could be different in each case when making cold calls as each prospect may have different pain. With that being the case, it can be difficult to script out this portion of a cold call. One way to prepare and drive consistent results is to produce a list of bullet points that cover the different types of value and benefits that could be delivered. Then the cold caller can share the items that either fit the best or will get the prospect's attention the most given their particular pain.