Cold calling scripts background
There are several problems with scripts and how they are applied to sales, but we are going to concentrate on the top several reasons that cold calling scripts don’t work.
Hello, is this Mr. (NAME)?
This is Bob and we have a very special offer for – *click (call disconnected).
Does that sound about right?
That’s because cold calling scripts don’t work – and that didn’t work because Bob was really set up for failure in the first place.
Anecdotal, this has been quite obvious for some time… but using conversational intelligence software has made the fact that cold calling scripts don’t work.
We’re also going to dive into what you can do to achieve the same results without having every employee and prospect loath the thought of communication to do with you organization.
- No personality allowed
- No adaptive/Human reasoning
- Voice inflection is inauthentic
- Skill level/Employee Mismatch – Poor product scalability
- Easy solution, not the right solution
Again, this isn’t a complete list of things that can contribute to cold call scripts and their inability to work.
The following content will break down why they don’t work specifically as well as speak to some solutions using conversation intelligence software.
Cold calling scripts don’t work because they don’t allow personality
This reason should seem relatively obvious, but cold calling scripts don’t work because your reps cannot inject their personality.
In other words, everyone sounds the same. Imagine those movies where mind control takes over a bunch of people at once.
The Disney Movie Incredibles comes to mind. In the movie, mind control takes over all of the superheroes and they begin to sound like monotoned zombies.
Do your very real human prospects want to chat with monotone zombies?
Of course not.
Sales teams are using conversational intelligence software to use small snippets of text that they want reps to use while allowing the rep to inject their own personality into the conversation. It’s a win-win where all the important topics get covered, and the rep still gets to have a personality and a say.
Don’t allow Human Reasoning
In a context when you have a script sometimes the conversational needs don’t match the script exactly.
When this happens and your reps are trying to only follow a script, they end up trying to fit the scripted conversation into a conversation that shouldn’t be.
This creates disastrous results for the rep and for your prospect. It could even create irreparable damage to your brand.
The solution to this problem in modern conversational intelligence software is allowing reps to skip over bullet points that don’t make sense in the conversation.
Giving them a list of things that they could talk about, but don’t necessarily have to.
Don’t let your reps have voice inflection
Not having voice inflection means that there’s no difference between literally having a computer make your phone call and using a cold calling script.
At that point, I would make an argument that a prerecorded autodialer would be better than a human just for ROI’s sake.
This is probably the worst thing that has ever happened to any type of cold call ever in the history of cold calls. Your reps sound like zombies because they can’t use voice inflection, and they can’t use voice inflection because you are having them literally read exactly what they need to say on a call.
They have no choice other than to follow exactly what you’ve told them to say and a repeatable fashion that gets mundane the first time they do it.
Modern sales call intelligence software helps to alleviate this pain by using small snippets of information that they can use to navigate a call using human intuition which allows them to use their own voice inflection as if they’re having a real conversation with a real person (like they are…).
You have the wrong employees
There, I said it.
If you’re using a cold calling script and expect your employees to follow it to the letter, then are you just hiring the wrong level of employee who is incapable of making their own adaptive decisions because you don’t trust them, or their skill level enough?
I would argue that you would be better off hiring 1 capable employee than 10 unskilled employees because 1 employee having 10 conversations a day that are productive is greater than 10 employees having 0 productivity.
Modern sales leaders are struggling to overcome this challenge because of labor shortages.
According to HubSpot you cannot give every individual individual advice of exactly what to say all of the time. However, the most innovative companies are using conversation intelligence platforms to level up employee’s skillsets and feeding their future talent pipeline.
Easy solution does NOT equal the right solution
Lastly, and probably the hardest to hear on why cold calling scripts don’t work, is that scripts, in general, are a lazy or overloaded management symptom.
It’s easy to tell a group of people to “follow this script”.
It is much more difficult to train and spend time leveling up your employees.
Part of the reason that this happens is that managers are spread thin and cannot be everywhere at once.
Some of the most innovative companies are overcoming this challenge by using conversational intelligence software that has real-time components to put coaching and adaptive behavior models directly in front of their employees as the conversations progress.