Preparing for a cold call is vital.
It’s how your company and product are introduced to your prospects – and there might not be a second chance.
So how can you prepare a cold call? Ideally, you should spend a bit over three minutes, but if it’s all the time you’ve got, it’s completely doable.
We asked a panel of pro SDRs to give us their surefire tips for cold call prepping under pressure. They shared that it all comes down to three key questions you need to answer: who you’re calling, why you’re calling, and why they should care.
Let’s jump in!
How to prep for a cold call in under three minutes
1. 60 seconds: Get to know your prospect
Preparation for a cold call begins with learning as much as possible about the person you will be addressing. The more information you know about them, the more successful your pitch will be.
Sebastian Sanders, Country Manager at Bloobirds, explains that “they need to understand why you are calling and that you’re not just another sales call getting those first 10 seconds right is key. This is typically the time when you are told that they aren’t interested, so this is a really important part. At least a minute of my time will be spent making sure I know what I am going to say to earn a short conversation with them.”
More specifically, Sarah Jane Hicks, Senior SDR at Predictable Revenue, recommends focusing on “the prospect’s LinkedIn profile for their title, how long they’ve been at the company, and their personal summary to get a sense of how they want people to see them.”
Aleksandra Andree, Sales Consultant at Bloobirds, also offers, “Make sure to look through their past experiences and achievements to see their level of expertise in the field, and their most recent activity and posts to identify possible interests. That way you can customize your approach accordingly.”
She also comments that, “based on all this research activity we can find out crucial information. We can get hints as to what might be the best channel to reach the prospect, how much time they might be willing to spend on a call, their decision making power within the company, and consecutively their willingness to talk and share information.”
2. 60 seconds: Get to know their company
After we’ve scanned through the prospect’s LinkedIn profile, we’ll quickly jump onto the company’s profile on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, or G2. Gaining an overview of the company will give us clues to create a bond with the prospect and engage them with the conversation.
Sarah suggests giving the company a quick search on Crunchbase or browsing through their website. This preliminary research will give us crucial information about “their competitors, a sense of their revenue, how many people work there (and) on the team I’m looking to work with, if they’re hiring for that team, when the company was founded, which industries they serve, how they position themselves, and any big news they’ve shared.”
This phase involves identifying “possible challenges they might be facing”, as pointed out by Aleksandra. For this reason, she also advises checking “any relevant news in other sources.”
Another tool that might prove to be very useful is G2 Stack, as recommended by Eoin McCall, Outbound Sales Consultant at Bloobirds. He checks the company profile on “G2 Stack to see what their current tech stack is looking like” – key knowledge to have when offering a SaaS solution.
3. 60 seconds: Create your Value Proposition
Quickly putting together what we’ve learned about the prospect and their company will give us the information we need to create the value proposition specific to our prospect. Once we’ve learned their pain, we can choose our pitch accordingly.
Brianna Wilson, Senior SDR at Vertify, adds that when she needs to prep for a cold call she goes “over specific pain points based on the buyer persona and how the product can solve them.” Since we’re short on time, make sure to have a quick list divided by buyer persona to pick from in Excel, or better yet inside a Sales Empowerment Platform.
For Sebastian, he advises that the value proposition is what catches the prospect’s attention. He builds a relationship between the “value proposition and what you have learned about their company. Something I like to do here is to jot down a few quick questions that I could ask the prospect. Not only to learn more about their situation, but potentially elicit some pains and hone in my pitch to their situation even more than it already is.”
Time’s up!
While every SDR knows three minutes is cutting it close for cold call prep time, sometimes it’s all you’ve got. Make sure to use your short window wisely. Spend the first minute on learning about the prospect, the next minute about the company, and the last minute connecting your value proposition. Being armed with solid initial information should help you at least get a quality conversation with the prospect.
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