The best “cold” calls to an executive start with, “I spoke with Jenna on your team and learned that you are currently working towards [goal] but getting stuck with [challenge].
You’ll immediately stand out from other sellers due to the strength of your point of view. While other sellers rely on publicly available knowledge pulled from research and AI tools, this opener references “secret information” earned from conversations within the account.
The only way you can start a cold call with that level of specificity is by having conversations across their org. This is critical to understand because it goes against what a lot of SDRs/Account Executives think about cold calling – setting a meeting is not the only possible “win” on a cold call.
In fact, I encourage my teams to call people that they don’t want to set a meeting with. Instead, they want to have a quick conversation to learn some “secret information” that will help them open conversations higher in the account.
Here’s a real cold call transcript of how this works (along with some of my commentary in bold):
Seller: Hey, [redacted], my name is [redacted] I’m calling from Launch Darkly. To be totally transparent, this is a cold call, but it’s a well researched cold call. If it’s not relevant to you, feel free to, you know, throw your phone across from and throw me as well, but if you have 20 seconds, do you mind if I get into why I was calling today?
Prospect: Well, I can tell you it won’t be relevant to me because I, I’m familiar with LaunchDarkly. I met you all at a conference, two years ago, but I brought that up with us already and we’re actually trying to run lean and mean, so we’re getting rid of a lot of services and like there just isn’t budget to, to bring stuff in unfortunately.
Seller: OK, OK, got you, got you. I mean, I know you said it’s not relevant, but just out of curiosity, what made you even want to bring it up to the rest of your team?
Great question that opens up the conversation… and leads to a referral! It’s amazing what a prospect will share once you successfully get them talking.
Prospect: because I thought the idea like the concept of simplifying, the launches, was, was nice because right now we have a pretty manual process, even though we have a whole devops team to handle it, so yeah, I was, you know, I like that in a perfect world, but, you know, sometimes you just don’t get the budget for the tooling, so. I mean, I think the person you really would want to talk to unless you already have is probably [redacted]. He’s the best person to be able to talk to because he participates in trials of software that we do consider and you know, he’s much closer to budgetary decisions.
Seller: OK, so [redacted] is that [redacted]… If I were to get him on a call, what kind of things would he mostly care about?
This question is phenomenal – it’s a great way to “dig for gold.”
Prospect: Time to production, so being able to reduce, reduce the time it takes, in our process to get things out and to be able to get them out, You know, consistently and more safely without issue and speed to roll back and I’m pretty sure you handle all three of those things, but yeah.
Now we’ve got some goal outcomes – these are gold nuggets.
Seller: OK, and then if you don’t mind me asking, this is great information. What’s your release process like today? Like what is that kind of, production look like today? How often are you releasing?
Great question to better understand their current state and associated metrics (which the prospect shares next).
Prospect: I mean different teams have slightly different cadences, but generally speaking from the time you plan a release to getting it out there, it’s probably 7 to 10 days.
Seller: OK, and that’s getting it through different environments and testing and stuff like that. And then for roll backs how long does it take to roll something back?
Prospect: I mean, anyway, once you identify a reason to roll back that can take anywhere from maybe 5-10 minutes to like an hour and a half depending on the situation.
Seller: Usually within that time frame, would you say that your customers are seeing the backlash of maybe like a bug being introduced during that time frame?
Great question to start uncovering some pain/impact that we can use at the executive level.
Prospect: Oh, that that’s the only reason we would ever roll back, yeah, got it customer customer impact yeah.
Seller: Got it got it are you first identifying the problem whenever a customer reaches out to you guys or you guys have some kind of proactive way of identifying a problem?
Prospect: Both we have logging and monitoring and alerting, so we try to proactively identify it or it could come from a customer complaint but it could be both.
Seller: well, amazing hey I don’t wanna take up too much of your time, [redacted], I really appreciate the insight and I really appreciate you being nice about giving me this data. I’ll reach out to [redacted], and, we’ll hopefully I can, I can get him on a call, but again, really appreciate it and hope you hopefully you enjoy the rest of your day.
Prospect: Thanks you too alright bye take care.
This call didn’t lead to meeting booked, but it’s full of gold nuggets that will help us get higher into the account.
Here are the “gold nuggets” we learned:
- They are consolidating tools due to budget constraints
- They have a manual release process, despite having dedicated DevOps resources
- Who to talk to AND what they care about: time to production, safe releases, speed to roll back
- Current state details:
- Release frequency is 7-10 days
- Rollbacks take anywhere from 5 to 90 minutes
- Bugs sometimes identified via customer complaints
Not bad for a “failed” cold call where we didn’t set a meeting.
Now let’s revisit my favorite opener with these nuggets included:
“I spoke with [redacted] on your team and learned that some of your rollbacks take as long as 90 minutes which is compounded by customer complaints. Sounds like the team is working on improving a lot of these processes but still has fairly manual processes – do you have a minute for me to share how we’ve helped similar companies automate their release/rollback process so they can fix problems before customers notice?”
When cold calling, look for (and celebrate!) multiple wins. Setting a meeting is great, but learning gold nuggets that you can use to book meetings in the future is also a big win.
