How to make more in less time — Cold Calls Checklist

​Now when we are at a time that we have to stay at home more than ever, it’s time to do something that we have not done before. It’s best to do something of utmost importance. What is more critical for business than sales?

Do you make active sales cold calls? Not many startup founders may afford to spend much time making calls themselves. It might be especially hard for the technical founders as they need time to do some coding.

​Cold calling is not only about sales but also about customer development and finding the product-market fit.

​We all know how important these areas are for every startup. Only the customers themselves may answer such questions as why they are interested to try your product (if they are) and even more important — why not?

We believe we found a way to save much time for that kind of activity and still get valuable insights for your business.

If you are not making enough cold calls (and it is never enough!), but at least you have someone who does that in your company — you still can get the most interesting insights from those conversations and here is how we do it.

At NeoSound Intelligence we use our own product to re-listen to the recorded calls made by our sales agents. This way we not only generate valuable feedback to make the product better but also get insights from listening to what customers say to our agents reacting to our standard sales pitch.

NeoSound Intelligence Call Assessment Tool and Customized Checklist

​After a few months of the active calling, we have come up with a polished sales script that has certain key moments — stages. The ideal script is never finalized. It is emerging. We add changes on a weekly basis getting inspired by what we listen to in the recorded conversations.

​Here is our checklist

1. Greeting. Thanks for taking my call. Just don’t ask “how are you doing”. See more John Barrows’ introductions for opening cold calls.
2. Introduction. My name is Denis and I am calling you from Amsterdam. Well this is not about Amsterdam or Munich, this is about what a local phone number they see on their phone. The stating your location that matches your phone number is the first easy thing to build the first trust at the opening of a cold call.
3. Ensure the right time. Am I interrupting anything? There are few contradictory opinions on this one. On the one hand — everyone is always busy. On the other hand — nobody wants to be annoyed and it is always good to get ‘a consent’ from the customer to proceed with the conversation. Happy to know about your experience — put it in the comments!
4. Person qualification. Get YES-1. Am I speaking to Mr Jonkins? Make sure that there is a right person speaking on the other side of the like.
5. Reason to call. Get YES-2. We are working with companies that … Are your company also like this? We try to get 3 YES from the customer before arranging an appointment. Here we assume that the 1st YES received at qualification step.
6. Reason to call. Get YES-3. We have learned that many of the companies are using calls monitoring in order to save their costs and increase the NPS. So, they listen to their agents’ recorded phone calls. Do you also do similar things at your company? For us, this is also a customer qualification step.
7. Discussion. Make a customer interested in the appointment. Terrific! Then it might be interesting for you to see how AI helps … When do you have 15 minutes? How about this on Thursday 15:00? About 10% of calls are reaching this point, so if we are here then it is terrific indeed. Here is the place for improvising more than in previous steps. The goal is to agree on the appointment. How many of your calls are successful?
8. Summary — appointment setting. You will receive the calendar invitation shortly. Our managers use my Calendly to set up an appointment with me.
9. Gratitude, farewell. Thank you so much for your time. Speak to you on Thursday at 15:00!

​From what we see, the call centre companies have a similar process of calls assessment and agent assessment procedures with their checklists. Many companies are still using MS Excel or similar solutions to do that job. With NeoSound we’ve made it convenient for ourselves and for the managers to work with the checklist right there, where you listen back to the call.

​Please let us know in the comments how you monitor your agents’ conversations and what the most important items you have in your checklist.

See also:

• How Your Call Center Can Survive The Coronavirus Crisis
• The Way To Maintain Customer Communication Standards
• How silence can kill your business