Need help getting new BDR’s confident on the phone and using the best scripting?
This article offers you a key tip to get BDR’s productive asap and minimize new rep turnover.
Common sense tells us your team will not respond well to less common situations unless they first master the most common situations
Master your most common situations before you start worrying about how to manage one-offs, exceptions to the rule, and the lunatic fringe.
All good phone scripts or sales conversations are built on strong foundations. If your goal is “good sales scripts” then you should work a process of getting there. The first step in the process is to identify your most common call path.
Master your most common call path
A decision-maker answers the phone.
You say something to open the call.
They object, ask a question, or call your mother names.
You respond.
They either tell you to get lost or say, “OK.”
You will either book the meeting or, if they have rejected you again, end with one final question. “Totally understand, don’t want to be on your back, but we do a lot of this, could you suggest a time for me to be back in touch?”
They give you a call back date or do not.
Bye.
Are your BDR’s hemming and hawing using a weak phone script
If your BDR’s are hemming and hawing, using a weak script that needs to be improved or projecting a lack of confidence with stammering, hesitations, and sounding like they are searching for words, they should not be thinking about how to handle situations that arise less frequently.
Those that try to prepare for everything on day one has a much harder time discovering what works. It is a common worry among those new to appointment setting or high-level prospecting.
The worry leads to overthinking about what to say if someone seems rushed, angry, busy, or rude. Or, how to respond if they say this, or say that, or ask this question. What am I going to say if, if, if, if, if? Yikes, slow down. Newbies overthink about how to handle less common phone situations and neglect mastering how to handle what they encounter most of the time.
But if you realize that you must walk before you can run. And that you will be better on day thirty than on day one, better the end of your 2nd month than you are the end of your first, then you can build your script confidence and improve your script responsiveness by taking things step by step.
Remember, you are not an over the phone mind reader or trying to guess what will work best on each individual call you make. If you are doing it right, you are calling into a group of similarly situated suspects and need to get a baseline sense of what scripting approach will generate the most results from the group you call.
With enough calls, practice, and patience, if you work a process of testing as you call, you will conclude:
– Most successful calls start when you open with a particular script.
– That there are typically three, but usually no more than five objections or questions you hear most often.
– That there is a response you give, which tends to work best for each of those 3 – 5 objections or questions.
– If they say “no,” there is a best way for you to ask if they could suggest a time for you to be back in touch.
– If they say “yes,” there is a best way to set the date and time and maximize show rate.
Perfect and polish the most common scenarios first, from start to finish
Worry and fret about phrasing, delivery, what words to use, and when, for your most common situations first. Put all the other stuff that “might” happen aside. In the beginning, do not be overly concerned about what to say if maybe, possibly, they might object or ask you a question. Until you get your core scenarios right, do not spend much time thinking about what to do in less common situations.
Until you get a strong sense of what works overall, you or your team is unlikely to figure out what works in less common scenarios, so don’t spend a lot of effort there initially.
