Reading time: 4 minutes

Happy Friday to 6,471 SaaS sales professionals!

This week's SaaS Sales System is the exact cold call script I used to generate $4M in pipeline and $2M ARR (50% conversion rate) as a BDR at Salesforce - 100% outbound during the pandemic.

Let's dive in!

The Problem With Cold Calling

I've coached 30+ reps 1:1 so far in 2023.

Most of them are solid prospectors.

Many of them have great email sequences.

But almost none of them are strong cold callers.

The phone lost a lot of its glamour since the advent of ever-growing sales tech stacks.

To me it is still the #1 sales tool. Why?

• The phone is the fastest path to achieving your goal: booking a meeting.
• You can establish trust, credibility and interest over the phone within seconds, or minutes. Impossible to do via any other channel.
• The phone is the only real time human to human conversation. All other channels are async (aka you have to wait for a response).

The phone is high risk, high reward.

You can get burned by prospects, yelled at, mess up your pitch and face failure pretty harshly.

But if I my script has helped 30+ reps succeed this year, it can help you too

Step 1: Opener with a trigger

The average human attention span is 8.25 seconds.

Therefore take advantage of a strong opener that positions you as an authority.

I'm not a fan of permission-based openers, btw. I prefer to get straight to the point:

Hi Sarah, this is Christian with COMPANY. Not sure if this is in your wheelhouse, but I saw you manage ad campaigns over at ACCOUNT. Is that still the case?

What's great about this opener is that it puts the ball immediately in the prospect's corner by having them validate you are talking to the right person. Because if not you can save your pitch and ask to be pointed in the right direction.

Step 2: Problem Statement

Prospect: Yup, that would be me. What is this about? Where did you say you're calling from?

What we need now is a problem statement.

Instead of pitching our solution, we are pitching a problem. We validate this problem exists, and if not, educate the prospect about it.

Our value prop will fall on deaf ears unless we establish relevancy in the context of a business challenge.

I'm with COMPANY. We help marketers with their ad campaigns. Out of curiosity, have you ever considered that you might be overspending on your ad campaigns?

This question works because it immediately focuses on business impact. Who doesn't want to save money on ads?

Prospect: Uhm, sure I mean I oversee the budget so I'm always looking for ways to save money on our ad campaigns. How can you help with that?

Before we insert our value prop we educate the prospect more.

Well, we hear from a lot of marketers that they don't have automatic ways to shut down campaigns across channels once their prospects take the desired action. As a result they keep running ads on prospects who already converted in a different channel.

Step 3: Ask for validation

 Remember, your problem statement is an assumption. It's important to always validate your assumptions with the prospect. Otherwise you have no credibility that you can help them.

How are you tackling that?

Once you ask for validation, SHUT UP. Listen what they have to say. Now the discovery process begins.

Step 4: Value prop with social proof

Prospect: Yeah we actually have a manual process to manage that. Our ad campaigns run separately from email and mobile targeting. We have people cross-check daily and manually stop and launch ad campaigns.

Once we have our problem statement validated we insert our value prop with social proof:

We work with a lot of people in similar roles whose marketing budgets have recently been cut quite dramatically. 

We built a platform that shuts down campaigns across all channels once your prospect takes the action you want. 

Ensuring you never target converted users or overspend on paid ads. 

Step 5: CTA

Now you're ready to ask for time. Get 15-20 minutes on their calendar for a quick deep dive. Get off the phone quick. Send the invite + upfront contract.

Sarah, would it be worth to have a deeper conversation around that?

Here's a summary of of my $2M ARR phone script:

1. Opener: state your name & company. ask the prospect to validate they are the right contact.

2. Problem statement: pitch your assumption about a business challenge the prospect might be facing.

3. Ask for validation. Educate more about the problem if more context is necessary.

4. Insert your value prop, stay high level on the benefits. Don't feature dump. Provide social proof, 2-3 valid customer references.

5. Book the meeting! Get it on the calendar, get off the phone. Send the invite + the upfront contract.

That's it! Now you have my $2M ARR cold call script.

A few final tips:

• It's less important what you say and more important how you say it.

• Talk slowly. With a calm voice. And downward inflection.

• Expect objections. They WILL come. Use labelling techniques.

 See y'all next week!