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Enterprise Sales Cold Calling Script: Prospect Into Enterprise Orgs

If you know Katy Mason-Jones, you’ll know she’s one of the very best salespeople Cognism’s got.

A consistent high-flyer in our outbound sales team, Katy has smashed targets and been rewarded with several promotions, including Enterprise SDR and Account Executive. As an SDR, she prospected into some of our biggest and highest-profile accounts.

We asked Katy to provide us with her cold calling script. This script enabled her to engage and convert decision-makers inside the world’s largest companies.

This is the ultimate cold calling script for enterprise sales 👇


The intro

A good cold call intro has to do two things:

  1. It has to catch the prospect’s attention, without being overly ‘salesy’ or pushy.
  2. It needs to be successful in building rapport with the prospect and getting a conversation going.

Since she’s dealing with enterprise clients, Katy likes to start with something unconventional.

She immediately lets the prospect know it’s a sales call.

Like this:

“Hi (first name), this is Katy calling from Cognism. For full transparency at the very beginning, this is a well-researched B2B sales call. I appreciate I’ve called completely out of the blue. Is now a bad time for a two-minute chat?”

Contrary to what you might expect, Katy has found that this intro gets great results - and the occasional laugh! She told us:

“I’ve had so many prospects say that they appreciate the honesty, and go on to say that they have a couple of minutes for me.”

The opening pitch

Katy’s intro made it clear this was a “well-researched B2B sales call.”

The next step is to demonstrate to the prospect that you’ve done your research. This is especially important when talking to enterprise decision-makers. You have to come to the call armed with knowledge about their company.

This is Katy’s opening pitch:

“Great! I see that you work with some B2B clients like (company name) in the (industry name) sector. We work with many similar companies such as (company name).” 

“After speaking with a lot of (job titles) at the moment like yourself, I’ve found they’re experiencing challenges with…”

The pitch will only work if you have a good idea of the following:

  • Who the prospect’s clients are.
  • What challenges people with their job title usually experience.

And of course, every pitch you make must be tailored to the prospect’s specialism. Remember that in enterprise sales, you’ll be prospecting to multiple people in an organisation.

For example, when cold calling marketing leaders, you can say:

“I see that as a team you’re trying to grow your audience and target (persona names) with your marketing campaigns.“ 

“With that in mind, do you think your team could benefit from a piece of in-house software that can deliver your content to those key personas at their most receptive buying period?”

And for cold calling sales leaders:

“I see you target (persona names). When it comes to your outreach, I was wondering if you had thought that your team could benefit from a tool that generates time-sensitive contact data, including mobiles, for those personas?”

Discovery

If your pitch goes well, the prospect will enter into a dialogue.

This stage of your call - the discovery stage - is the most important. It’s where cold calls are won or lost.

What you have to do is walk a tightrope. You have to probe the prospect as much as possible, while making sure it’s them, not you, that does most of the talking.

Katy’s top tip is to ask open-ended questions. Her favourite first question is:

“How do you currently generate new business?”

The prospect’s answer to this allows you to tailor your later discovery questions. For example, if they reply with:

“We use LinkedIn and email campaigns.”

Then you wouldn’t start pitching them about the quality of your mobile data.

Katy has a list of great initial discovery questions. They are:

“What channels do you use to reach out to your leads?”

“What’s your target market in terms of job title/location/company size?”

Then there are questions to help you dig deeper and uncover some quantified statistics:

“What are your email bounce rates?”

“What’s your connect rate for every 100 direct dials you’re getting from your current contact data provider?”

“Out of every 20 InMails you’re sending, how many responses do you get?”

But as you ask these questions and the prospect replies, remember...

You must take notes!

Make sure you write down every detail; you’ll need them in the closing phase of the cold call.

Katy formats her notes like this, dividing her notebook into separate sections:

Topic

Information

Data generation

Using list brokers

Current sales process

LinkedIn prospecting
Email campaigns

Pain points

No accurate email addresses
No direct dials
Manually inputting data into CRM

Tech stack

Salesforce
LinkedIn Sales Navigator


Formatting your notes means you can easily refer back to points during the conversation and repeat issues to the prospect. Katy shared an example:

“You mentioned your sales reps are manually inputting data into your CRM. Can you go into more detail on that, how long does it take?”

Katy had some more advice on note-taking:

“On enterprise sales calls, you can be given lots of information. Taking notes means you won’t miss any qualifying questions. It also makes life easier when it comes to typing up your demo notes. You don’t want to forget anything!”

The main pitch

The trick with your main pitch is…

Keep it simple!

Don’t go into too much depth. Explain how your product will fit it into the prospect’s current process, and what the end result will be.

Again, you should modify your main pitch depending on who you’re speaking with.

For sales:

“To explain where we could fit into your process, we have a tool that you would run searches on, find your ICP, and at the click of a button generate mobile numbers.”

“This would save your reps hours of time, so you can focus on more important, revenue-generating tasks.”

For marketing:

“To explain where we could fit into your process, we have a tool to help you find people in your ICP, generate their emails and increase your matched audiences.”

“We would act as a repeatable source of net new data in your funnel, so you can actively deliver your content at the optimal times.”

It’s also a good idea to integrate their current processes into your pitch. This adds another layer of personalisation to your call, which prospects often respond well to.

“Typically, clients who move away from (competitor name) found that they were experiencing issues with (x). Have you experienced similar issues?”

This helps you discover pain points and put forward your product as the solution.

Katy’s final tip for the main pitch - it pays to throw in a case study to back up your claims!

“Our client (company name) was experiencing similar issues with (competitor name/hours of time spent prospecting/high bounce rates etc).”

“Since they started working with us, they managed to cut (x) down and achieved ROI in 3 months.”

The close

Katy’s golden rule for closing enterprise sales is:

Assume the sale!

Instead of saying:

“Would you like to take a look at the platform?”

She makes it seem like attending a demo is the obvious next step for the prospect:

“When works for you to get eyes on the tool?”

After Katy’s arranged a time with the prospect, there’s something she always does next:

“Make sure they receive the calendar invite while you’ve got them on the phone! I’ve had the nightmare scenario several times where there’s been a typo in their email address or the invite lands in spam, so when it comes to the demo time, they’ve forgotten all about it!”

Qualifying questions

Now you’ve booked in the prospect, that’s it, right? Job done?

Wrong!

In enterprise sales, it’s good to ask some additional questions, in order to qualify things like timing and authority.

Deals with enterprise orgs have much longer sales cycles and more decision-makers involved. You want to give the AE as much heads-up on this as possible, enabling them to manage the process more smoothly.

However, there are ways of phrasing these questions correctly. Questions like this might alienate the prospect:

“Are you the decision-maker in this process?”

Instead, Katy recommends you ask questions like...

“Is there anyone who would feel left out if they didn’t see the platform with you?”

“Who else needs to get eyes on this with you to streamline the process?”

A good question Katy uses to get an understanding of timelines is:

“If the tool is right for you and you think it will help you achieve your goals, when would you want to implement it? Right away? Or in a couple of months?”

💡 Tip! If you're looking for more cold calling insight, you might enjoy these articles on the difference between warm calling vs cold calling?9 common cold calling objections and how to respond and cold email templates: 14 of the best for sales.

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