How to prepare for a sales call before you dial

Prepare for a sales call by making, before you dial, the thing you would otherwise spend the call describing: one finished piece of your work, done on a real case of theirs, sent with the email that asked for the call. Then write the call down: a timed agenda, your opening line, the question that decides the call, what each answer to it will mean, the one thing you will ask for at the end, and the sheet the answers go on.

The example below is a twenty-minute first call, written out in full for a run of forty conversations with agency owners before the first of them took place. The calls were the founder's to hold, as early sales calls have to be.

Know three things before you accept the time

Three questions have answers you can reach before anyone speaks, and they decide whether the call happens and who should be on it.

• Would they want it free? Answer for them, honestly, and count their time as part of the price. If they would turn it down even at no cost, they are a no, and a no will happily pass for a slow deal for weeks. Rule them out instead.
• Whose quarter depends on it? The question is never whether they could use it. You want a named person whose current quarter turns on the problem you solve.
• Who does the work today? If they already pay people to do it, the sale gets harder, the pitch moves to capacity, and the person on the call needs to sit above the people whose work would change.

These are the same tests that decide who belongs on a list at all, asked once more of the one company whose call is in your diary.

Make the thing before the call

In that twenty-minute call, the three minutes after the opening went to one finished piece of the seller's own output, made for one of the agency's real prospects before the call. A demo and a slide deck both describe the work. This was the work, done on their material.

It had already gone out with the first email, so the agency owner had it before anyone dialled, and the call was a second look. That order was the whole design of the outreach: because the email carried the output itself, a reply was already evidence, and so was silence.

Doing it this way changes what the call is for. You spend no minutes explaining what you could do for them, because they are holding it. The minutes go on whether they want it, and on what would have to be true for them to pay. The same move works in a cold email, where the value is attached rather than offered.

Write the agenda in minutes

The call ran to twenty minutes, split in advance:

Twenty minutes was chosen on purpose. Forty calls at twenty minutes is about thirteen hours, which fitted the time set aside for the whole exercise with room left for finding the people. At forty-five minutes the same forty calls take thirty hours. A longer call is a nicer conversation, and you have far fewer of them.

What to ask in the ten minutes is its own subject, covered in treating the first call as research. The point here is that the minutes are written down before the call, so the close gets its three minutes and the call ends on the ask.

Write the three sentences that matter

Three moments carry the call, and each gets its words written in advance.

The opening. The one written for these calls: "I'm trying to work out whether what I've built is worth anything to someone who does what you do. I'm not selling. I'd rather you tell me it's useless. Can I show you one thing and ask five questions?" It asks permission for exactly what the agenda holds.

The question. Written once, word for word, and asked exactly that way on every call, so that forty answers can be put side by side. Then stop talking.

The ask. One, and never a discount. The close written for these calls: "If I set this up for one of your accounts this week, would you use it and tell me what's wrong with it?" A discount offered early also costs you a fact: once the price has moved, you cannot learn what they would have paid. Note whether a conversation about price happened at all, and say the price out loud if it does not come up. For the hard question nobody prepared for, have a shape for answering it while you think.

Decide what the answers mean before you hear them

Write the scale before the first call. For the deciding question it was three marks: yes, no or hedged, with the exact words written down when it was a hedge, and a hedge counted as a no until something proved otherwise.

The same goes for the decision the calls add up to. The numbers that would count as success were written before the first conversation, said out loud, so that four weeks later they would be read rather than argued about. Written first, a pass mark cannot be renegotiated once the results are in.

Of everything on the sheet, their exact words in answer to the deciding question are the one signal nobody has filtered. Paraphrase is how a no, but turns into a yes three weeks later.

Have the sheet open before you dial

Set up the page the answers go on before the first call, with a field for each thing the decision needs and nothing else. Use whatever you will really fill in at six in the evening after a call. Fill it in within five minutes of hanging up, before the next call starts. The failure this guards against is a run of good conversations that nobody wrote down, and a remembered conversation is an anecdote.

Five things

1. Check the free test, the named person and who does the work today before you accept the time.
2. Make one finished piece of your work on their material and send it before the call.
3. Write the agenda in minutes, and keep the call short enough to have many of them.
4. Write the opening, the deciding question and the one ask word for word, with no discount in the ask.
5. Decide what each answer means, and open the sheet, before you dial.