When I hear a startup’s cold call scripts for the first time, they usually sound something like this:
“Hi, is this David? Do you have a minute? Great, this is Arnie, I’m calling from [company]. We help teams like yours with [problem], so you can [get benefit], using our product that does [description]. Does that sound like something you’d want to learn more about?” — followed by a few discovery questions, a brief product pitch and an ask for a meeting.
While this approach seems logical, all it actually does is overload the prospect with information and give them multiple reasons to say no thanks, not interested or send me the info (aka leave me tf alone). In fact, the pattern that I see is that the more information the rep gives, the fewer meetings they book.
The reality is cold calling is not about selling the product. It’s about selling the next step (usually a meeting), yet most scripts are written to emphasize the former. A different goal requires a different approach.
This post covers:
Why your BDR’s only goal is a held meeting
How to pick the right opener based on your prospect’s context
How to bridge from opener to closing in 2 questions
What to say in voicemails
Your sole mission is to book the meeting
A BDR/SDR has one job: Get a qualified prospect (i.e. a prospect from a pre-qualified target list) to attend a meeting.
Not a discovery call. Not a mini pitch. Not a qualified opportunity. If the meeting happens, the BDR did their job and the rest is up to the founder or AE who takes that meeting.
This sounds obvious yet very few people write scripts this way. Once you accept that the meeting is the product, half the script falls becomes irrelevant. You stop trying to run discovery with someone you literally just interrupted, you stop trying to get them to imagine what your product looks like (that’s literally what a demo call is for) and you stop trying to create urgency out of thin air.
The script ends up way shorter and shorter scripts book more meetings (just like shorter emails and shorter DMs).
Write your opener based on the prospect’s context
People obsess over openers for good reason: if you fluff your opener its all downhill from there. But there’s no way to wordsmith your way past cramming too much information into the first ten seconds of a call.
Instead, write your opener based on your prospect’s context i.e. where they already are in the process of evaluating you. For example: