When building a cold call script, there can be a right way and a wrong way to go. Let’s first discuss the wrong way.

Don’t Write a Monologue
When many sales professionals and sales managers write a cold calling script, they often write out a page of paragraph after paragraph for the sales person to read from in order to make the prospect interested.

This is a bad way to go for a cold call script few different reasons:

  1. This usually produces a lot of verbiage for the sales person to memorize and this is difficult. If it is difficult, someone either will not be likely to adopt it or will try to adopt it but may not perform well. You need the to be easy to use and incorporate.
  2. This type of cold calling script puts the sales person in a position where they are doing most of the talking. A powerful sales script gets the prospect doing more of the talking.
  3. The reason that these sales scripts get so lengthy with stuff for the sales person to say is that there is this persistent desire to only focus on building interest and to primarily do this by talking about the company and product details. This presents a scenario where you are coming from an angel of “all about me”. A better way to go is to be “all about them”, meaning be all about the prospect.
  4. This type of cold call script is not flexible. What if the prospect asks a question, throws out an objection, tries to take the call in an unexpected direction? You never know how a cold call is going to go and working off a list of paragraphs simply does not allow the sales person to be fully prepared for what all the different things that can happen.

Use an Outline Format
The best way to go with building a cold call script is to use more of an outline structure. With this approach, you can create the main sections of a cold call:

  • Introduction
  • Value Statement
  • Disqualify Statement
  • Pre-Qualifying Questions
  • Common Pain Examples
  • Product / Solution Details
  • Name Drop
  • Close for Next Step

Those are just some sections of a cold calling script that we recommend and your sections could be different. But the key takeaway is to breakdown your script and pitch into sections.

By having your flow broken down into sections, you will be better able to focus on all of the different things that you need to do during the call. You will also be able to better adjust with different directions that a cold call can go as you do not need to go through the sections from beginning to end as you can jump from one section to another according to how the prospect responds.

Use Primarily Bullet Points
Once you have the sections broken down, you can then build out some of the content in each section. Instead of writing a lot of paragraphs in each section, use primarily bullet points.

Using bullet points will make it easier to memorize the script – it is a lot easier to memorize a set of bullet points compared to a set of paragraphs.

It is also easier to take bullet points and put them into your own words when on a cold call helping you to not sound like you are reading from a script and making you sound more natural.


SalesScripter helps sales pros to build a cold call script.