“Hi David, I’ve just set up my own software consultancy firm and I have started to make cold calls to drum up some leads. I’m finding it pretty hard going as I’ve never had to make sales calls before. A friend recommended that I should write myself a sales script, but I’m worried I’ll end up sounding like a robot. How can I avoid this?”
Paul Hawkins, Director, PJH Solutions
Hi Paul. If you think of how a newsreader sounds, they read from an autocue but they sound very natural. Once you’ve written your script, practice reading it aloud and you will quickly learn how to sound like you’re having a normal conversation rather than reading from a piece of paper.
The best piece of advice I can give you is to match your tone to the tone of your prospect – we like buying from people who are the same as us, and mirroring your prospect’s tone and speech pattern is a great technique to build rapport without them even realising how you’re doing it.
And anyway, after a couple of months of making calls you won’t need to look at your script very often because its’ content will be firmly planted in your brain - you’ll be able to recite it word for word with your eyes closed! This will make you sound very natural on the phone, and not at all robot-like!
