There’s a natural tendency when B2B prospecting to want to boast about your company and the products or services you offer. After all, if you aren’t passionate about your offering, why should your target care?
But there’s a time and a place to “sell,” and a cold call isn’t it. The goal, at least at first, is to have a business conversation with your target customer, not a product conversation.
“The first call is not about your solution. That’s not what prospecting is about,” B2B Sales Coach and Trainer Jason Bay said during a recent cold calling webinar. “The goal of prospecting is to find alignment with your prospect around the priorities and problems they have compared to other people like them.”
In other words, it’s not what you’re offering that matters most during a cold call. It’s how your offering can help your prospect solve a common paint point in their industry. You want to share benefits that resonate with your target buyer on an emotional, strategic, or financial level—or, ideally, all three.
One of the ways to accomplish this is by describing a customer success story during the call that tangibly illustrates the value of your product or service. When decision-makers hear that similar companies have achieved a certain level of success, they’re likely to be curious about how they did it, and subsequently will be more agreeable to a follow-up call with a sales rep. Nobody wants to feel like they’re missing out or falling behind their competitors.
Many cold calls are greeted with skepticism, so it’s important to convince the prospect as quickly as possible that there’s value in continuing the conversation.
“Don’t be that rep that wastes a prospect’s time,” Bay said. “Make it worth their time. And you do that by sharing what other customers similar to them are doing.”
When developing these customer success stories for your cold calling scripts, it’s helpful to follow the “PAR” framework: Problem, Action, Result. Steve Richard, Senior Vice President of Sales Enablement at Mediafly, described this framework in a recent video he posted on LinkedIn:
“What problem did the customer face? What action did they take, including your solution, but other things too, and what was the result their business experienced, preferably tied to a quantitative metric,” Richard explained.
A compelling customer success story during a cold call obviously won’t always lead a prospect to take the next step in the sales journey. As with any cold call, you still need to catch the right person at the right time, and maybe even in the right mood. But if presented well, customer success stories can have a positive impact on your conversation-to-opportunity rate.
Here are three things to consider when developing a customer success story for your typical cold calling script:
1. Keep it concise
You want to clearly demonstrate how you helped a similar type of company succeed, but you don’t want to risk losing your prospect’s attention with a long, drawn-out narrative. Your success story should be a couple of sentences at the most—long enough to touch on the Problem, Action, Result, but short enough to keep your prospect from growing restless or impatient during the call.
Maybe they’ll want more details or have follow-up questions, but that’s a good thing, because it’s a perfect opportunity to schedule an appointment for them with your product expert.
2. Make it specific
It’s not always possible, but being able to share specific evidence of how your offering has benefited other companies can go a long way toward piquing a prospect’s interest during a first cold call. It’s hard not to be swayed by actual numbers or direct examples.
Anybody can say “we help our customers grow their business” or “we help our customers save money,” but having facts to back that up makes the case much more persuasive.
A few examples that VSA has used while cold calling on behalf of clients:
- A provider of talent acquisition solutions: “We found we were able to reduce [Customer’s] time to hire by 30%, and they now hire people twice as fast as others in their industry.”
- A cybersecurity company: “What it meant for [Customer] was they were able to eliminate the need for manual, time-consuming scanning processes, and ensure the entire IT estate is being monitored and protected 24/7. In addition, they were able to automate vulnerability management reporting, reducing the time and effort required for compliance with security regulations and audit activities.”
- A technology advisor: “We were able to fix [Customer’s] costs and decrease their monthly technology spend by a lot more than we expected. If I recall, it could have been as much as 39%.”
3. Make it relatable
You always want to share success stories from customers that are similar in nature to the company you’re calling. Obviously, that starts with industry type, but it can also include company size, geographic location, the type of clients they serve, etc. The more similarities between the prospect you’re calling and the existing customer you’re referencing, the more likely the pain points are comparable.
Because of this, it’s often helpful to have a few different customer success stories at your fingertips, so you can plug in the most appropriate one depending on the prospect you’re calling. This is especially beneficial for companies targeting customers within multiple verticals.
For one recent technology consulting client, VSA prepared seven different customer success stories for our Business Development Representatives to choose from during phone calls to prospects, representing five different verticals. Another example is a calling campaign we did for a client in the education space, where our success stories differed based on the types of institutions we were calling and their region of the country.
Conclusion
It’s virtually impossible to convince a prospect to buy your product during a cold call. That should almost never be the goal of a sales professional.
It’s much more effective to tap into a problem they have, share an example of how you helped a business like theirs solve that problem, and assure them that it’s worth their time to book a follow-up conversation with an expert.
Want to learn more about how VSA utilizes customer success stories in our cold calling scripts? Give us a call, drop us an email, or schedule a call with our team. We’re always happy to talk about ways we can help you fill your sales funnel and grow your business.