It’s a common worry among those new to appointment setting or high-level prospecting.
Frankly, it also absorbs too much bandwidth among those that are working hard at prospecting yet not getting enough results.
The worry which distracts from using the right verbiage to reach your business objective with a call or meeting, called preparation or scripting, is overthinking about what to say if someone is 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.
Your Team Will Not Respond Well To Less Common Situations Unless They First Master The Most Common Situations
If you want to be a better prospector, master your most common situations before you start worrying about how to handle 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 don’t.
Bye.
Master your most common phone situations first
If you are hemming and hawing, using a script that needs to be improved or projecting a lack of confidence with stammering, hesitations, and sounding like you are searching for words, you should not be thinking about how to handle situations that arise less frequently.
Those that try to prepare for everything on day one have a much harder time discovering what works.
But, if you realize that you must walk before you can run. And that you will be better on day 30 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.
If you are a newbie, training a new hire or onboarding a new BDR, focus first on getting comfortable with your most common scenarios.
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 situation 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 3, 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 don’t 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, you are not in a position to even try to come up with 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.
