A simple guide to prepare for each inbound sales call

The first call with a potential customer is one of the most important stages in a sales funnel. It’s a unique opportunity to make a great first impression. At Amplemarket we approach our cold calls and warm calls with the same seriousness. In this post, we are going to focus on warm calls with inbound leads.

Taking a few minutes to prepare your calls is one of the most important factors when it comes to closing. Even when we are talking with inbound prospects we always aim to make a great first impression. Inbound prospects are usually evaluating several other tools so we strive to stand out amongst their other daily interactions.

This cheatsheet is a result of an iterative process of several hundred calls by our sales team. We tried to distill best practices and want to provide insights into what we have seen work and not work. The main thing we know that works is preparation & training.

 Sales is not an art. The best salesperson is the one who studies the company, listens to the customer and is able to leverage his preparation.

In our best sales calls we were fully prepared with this cheatsheet:

The first step is: Preparation

 It’s crucial that you learn about the company and the prospect at the same time.

For instance, when we’re learning about the company at Amplemarket we try to understand:

• How big their sales/growth teams are
• How much money did the company raise (if they have raised)
• What recent news there are about the company

Whereas when we’re learning about the prospect we usually visit their LinkedIn profile and try to get insights from it. It’s valuable that you show your prospect that you have spent some time doing your research.

Note: While checking the prospect’s LinkedIn, perhaps you will find connections or interests in common, or even similar background education. This can make you two easily connect during the call.

The second step: the Call

 This is the time to actively listen to your prospect’s pain points, ask questions to get all the information you need about the prospect and the company.

1- Start by building rapport. After setting a nice tone, make it all about them. The time you spend talking on a sales call has a significant impact on your chance to close the deal. In fact, top sales performers are known for consistently letting their prospects talk about 60% of the time, so it’s your prospect who should be talking the most. We often get surprised by the amount of information prospects share when we ask open-ended questions.

2- Make sure your research is well informed. Try to get answers to your questions and have your prospects verbalized their pain points before you start pitching.

3- Give your pitch. Once both of you have acknowledged your prospect’s pain, you will now be better informed to give your prospect an adapted pitch about how your product solves their issue.

💡 Insightful Note: If you’re not able to find any good arguments that could make your product useful to the company, maybe it’s because it doesn’t qualify as a potential user. You should acknowledge this and since it’s very unlikely that you would be getting a deal from here, avoid wasting your time trying to sell and focus rather on creating a connection they might be a buyer in their next company.

The third step: Next steps

 Keep your lead moving further along the sales funnel by making sure you have well defined next steps.

For example, if you want a follow-up meeting to do a demo, make it so that you book it at the end of the call. Or if you want to involve other decision-makers, make sure you know who they are at the end of the call.

When you see you only have 5 more minutes in your calendar, you should schedule the next meeting step before you finish the call and your prospect has to leave unexpectedly. It’s also important that you know if there are other people to be involved in the deal and your prospects know exactly what to do next.

Note: If you fail to schedule the next steps, you may end up losing a client because the prospect couldn’t find it easy to schedule a next call with you or your proposal lost relevance after they had a call with another competitor which already gave them a trial version they are enjoying.

Why are we telling you all this?

It wouldn’t be possible to gain so much experience in calls if we weren’t using Amplemarket. With our tool, we are able to increasingly schedule more calls and our AEs have the time on their agenda to really focus on what’s most important, delivering an outstanding sales experience to our customers.

Feel free to sign-up here to see how this could work for you too.

We have also prepared a cold call and demo cheatsheet for you, reach out to team@amplemarket.com to receive the 3 cheatsheets in your inbox and keep posted on our latest blog posts.