In medical sales, the traditional approach for sales representatives is to use face-to-face meetings with decision makers to influence them. In person meetings provide the best chance for sales reps to get to know their prospects and form a long-lasting business relationship.
However, in-person sales aren’t the only tool for medical sales teams. Some sales teams engage in a practice known as “cold calling” to reach out to a lot of potential buyers quickly without the need for prolonged in-person meetings or making travel arrangements.
What is cold calling? Does cold calling work? How can companies use it effectively? What are some sample phone call scripts that companies might use for a cold call?
Cold calling is the act of calling sales leads who have had little (or no) previous contact with the sales rep or their company. These leads haven’t been given time to “warm up” to the company’s products or services, which makes them “cold.”
In other words, cold calling is an “outbound” sales technique where a company’s sales team proactively reaches out to potential buyers without a prior relationship. Many businesses that specialize in cold calling use a set phone call script that they recite near-verbatim for every call.
A simple “warm definition” as it relates to sales would be a prospect who has engaged with the brand the salesperson represents at some point or has “raised their hand” to receive marketing communications from the brand.
Want to reach decision-makers in medical industry businesses? Download the Guide on How to Reach Decision-Makers in Medical Sales!
As with any sales technique, the ultimate goal of cold calling is to close deals. However, that isn’t the only goal. The true purpose of making cold calls for many sales departments is to initiate contact with prospects and leads.
The calling might be cold, but the goal is to get prospects to warm up and build brand awareness. A cold call is seldom the stopping point for sales efforts—instead, it is often just the first step in engaging potential customers and guiding them through the sales process.
It can be extremely important to do cold calling the right way. For example, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) prohibits the use of automated marketing messages (prerecorded messages or artificial response systems). “Cold calls” using prerecorded messages could create legal liabilities that cost $500 to $1,500 per call.
Medical sales teams really shouldn’t be using prerecorded messages anyways, as it isn’t really effective in reaching decision-makers in most healthcare industry-related organizations at any rate—especially when those decision-makers filter their incoming calls through gatekeepers.
So, how can you do cold calling the right way? Following a few simple cold calling tips can help:
Who is the target audience for your medical products or services? What are their biggest goals and challenges? How can your company best help its prospects meet their goals or overcome challenges?
Prior to cold calling prospects, it’s important to identify and thoroughly research them. By leveraging this information and including it in the cold calling script, it can be easier to gain the prospect’s full attention and earn a second sales call or close a deal.
Doing this research ahead of time can also help you filter your cold calling list so you can focus on the best prospects (potentially improving results while minimizing time and money spent following less qualified leads).
You can take this a step further by doing research on specific contacts prior to the call. For example, who is the CEO/President/Chair of the Board at the target company? What is their most important product/service? Have they been featured in industry publications (or made contributions to one)?
Having this information can be useful for creating a fully-customized marketing message that resonates with the prospect.
One of the big challenges in cold calling sales is that, on that first call, the prospect often doesn’t have a clue about your company and what it can do. Because of this, the prospect isn’t usually too keen to close a deal (unless they have some kind of immediate, pressing need you can solve).
So, it may be best to treat a cold call less like a chance to close a deal right away and more like an opportunity to learn about the prospect and your sales efforts—especially at first.
For example, as you go through your cold call script, is there any point at which the prospect obviously “checks out” (goes silent, begins just mumbling replies, or starts telling you they aren’t interested)? That could be an indication of a problem with your sales script that needs to be fixed.
Call recordings can be an immensely useful tool for reviewing sales calls (both successful and unsuccessful) and finding out where improvements can be made. It can also be useful for identifying individual sales reps who need to improve or could provide useful advice to their peers.
However, it is very important to get a prospect’s consent prior to recording a call, even if it’s just for quality assurance and training purposes. This is especially important if you’re making cold calls to states with an “all-party” consent rule for recording (which accounts for 15 States of the USA).
“One-party” consent states generally allow for recordings to be made so long as the person making the recording is a party to the conversation. However, it may be best to request permission or at least notify the other party that the call is being recorded. If the practice is consistent for all calls, it’s easier to avoid accidents that create legal liabilities.
Have you ever received a sales call where it was kind of obvious that the person on the other end of the line was just going through the motions? Like they had completely memorized a call script and just recited it without any real thought as to how to transition into a real conversation?
While having a sales script with dialogue trees and generalized responses can be highly useful, no script can be 100% foolproof for all sales situations. So, it’s important to be able to adjust on the fly to unexpected customer responses or opportunities.
For example, if a customer obviously sounds stressed or tired, it can help to ask them about their problems—they may just bring up an issue that your company’s products or services can help with. Having a script for such situations along the lines of “Oh yeah, a lot of people struggle with X. That’s why we made Y product/service to help with X” can help serve as a conversation launching point.
Alternatively, some prospects may respond better to more or less formality in a sales call. Being able to adapt on the fly and use language that addresses the customer’s need for respect or desire for frankness can help with building a positive, long-term relationship.
A lot of prospects won’t even answer the phone if they don’t recognize the number. Preparing a short introductory message for these answering machines can help you promote your medical or pharmaceutical company to customers and (hopefully) earn a callback.
These messages should be short (20 seconds or less), address the prospect by name, use a positive tone of voice, and introduce you and your company.
Part of an effective strategy for calling leads is really getting to know what their individual priorities and preferences are. While market research is a good start, it doesn’t always give you a clear picture who of a prospect is as a person.
Incorporating some open-ended questions can help you get a feel for what the prospect’s top priorities or concerns are. This information can prove incredibly useful.
For example, something as simple as “what’s your most important business goal?” or “where do you see your company in five years?” could help you get an idea of who your prospect is and what they really want.
While simple yes/no questions can also be important, they don’t give the prospect as much room to elaborate on what they want.
To help you get started on cold calling, here are a few script examples that you may be able to use in your own cold calls. These examples are broken down into different modules to make them easy to insert into different parts of a cold call:
“Hi [Contact Name], this is [Rep Name] from [Rep’s Company]. I wanted to ask you about your [medical business type] and some of the ways that we can help you. Do you have a few minutes to talk?”
You may notice the bracketed text like “[medical business type]” in the example above. This text should change for each prospect based on their information. For example, if the prospect is part of a hospital, [medical business type] would be “hospital” instead. It’s also important to have placeholders for if you don’t have that contact information ready—such as saying “Hi there,” instead of “Hi Chuck” if you don’t know Chuck’s name.
Tailoring a list of open-ended questions based on your medical/pharmaceutical products and services can be helpful for collecting information about the prospect and how you can best meet their needs.
Over time, it can help to make a list of some of the most common objections that you encounter on cold calls and create responses you can use to overcome them.
Some examples of rejections and responses include:
“We’re satisfied with our current drug, [competitor brand prescription].”
For the first two example responses, it’s incredibly important to make sure any claims are backed up by hard data. The final example could be a good way to collect more information about the competition and how you can provide a unique value compared to them.
“We don’t have the budget for a new solution right now.”
Here, the goal is to acknowledge the cost hurdle and get the prospect to think less about the initial price and more about the benefits they’ll see from the solution.
Not every cold call will result in a sale. However, just because the prospect says “no,” that doesn’t mean it’s all over. Here’s a sample cold call script for turning rejections into learning opportunities:
“I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. Before I go, I’d like to ask you why you don’t think that [company name] can help you?”
This can help you learn more about the reasons for a rejection so you can take them into account on future calls.
Need help building your own medical sales? Reach out to Axxelus today to get started with contract sales services that produce real results!