Common Features From Sales Calls

These are real voice-of-customer examples taken straight from Sales Call Transcripts.

#Common Prospect Challenges/Pain Points

1. Lead Flow & Pipeline Problems

This is the most common and direct pain point: not having enough opportunities to hit sales targets.

A. Not Enough Leads / Empty Pipeline (Volume)

• We aren’t getting enough lead flow to hit our revenue goals.
• My sales people have empty calendars because there’s no lead.
• Our bottleneck is just lead gen in general, I think. We just don’t have a lot coming in.
• We haven’t cracked the B2B finding leads nut.
• Declining lead volume.
• They haven’t had anything in the funnel for 6-8 months.
• Q1 is pretty much empty based off of what we’ve signed.
• Generating a consistent flow of high-quality leads.
• Needing consistent lead flow to scale (currently inconsistent).
• Not currently generating new leads from cold channels.

B. Poor Lead Quality (Quality)

• A lot of leads that we are getting are not qualified.
• Cold campaigns brought in a lot of leads, but not a lot of good leads.
• The quality of leads can improve.
• The leads that come in are not necessarily qualified.
• Improving lead quality and filtering out junk leads.
• The leads that did come through were completely wrong targets with the wrong messaging.

2. Sales Team & Process Inefficiency

Challenges related to how the sales team operates, their productivity, and the lack of a repeatable process.

A. Wasted Rep Time & Low Productivity

• Our AEs spend too much time prospecting and not enough time closing deals.
• Overreliance on sales reps for sourcing leads.
• My business developers are doing SDR work and it’s not producing the greatest results.
• Everyone’s wearing too many hats.
• Balancing time between sales and other responsibilities.
• For some reason, when salespersons come to our organization, they tend to do nothing at all.
• We used to have a bigger sales team but they didn’t produce enough results.

B. Lack of Process & Enablement

• Lack of repeatability and predictability in the sales process.
• Dependence on salespeople for customer acquisition.
• Sales team is primarily order takers, lacking an outbound lead generation process.
• Manual hunting and pecking for leads.
• Current process is not sustainable.
• Old school methods are not motivational and are a slug.
• Getting everything into a CRM for the first time.
• Figuring out the streamlined messaging.
• Determining the best use of the new sales hire’s time.

3. Outreach & Channel Ineffectiveness

Problems with the specific methods and channels prospects are using for outreach.

A. General Outreach Failure

• We are not using tools, but manually we are using email outreach as well as LinkedIn.
• We did a website, we did some AdWords. We just weren’t getting the kind of success and conversions that we wanted.
• Cold outreach just doesn’t work or you’ve got to do it at such a scale and really have the pieces plugged in to get the responses.
• Outbound efforts like cold email and LinkedIn outreach never really worked.
• I’ve been doing this thing for almost five years now and I’m still not, I still haven’t been able to crack the code.
• Something’s not working with the current outbound strategy.
• Responses to outbound efforts are really pretty horrible.
• Not getting enough responses from large email blasts.
• Cold calling is not very effective.

B. Difficulty Reaching the Right People (Targeting OR Process)

• We have a really hard time finding the right contacts at the company.
• Finding obstacles and struggles to reach the final end customers.
• We get gatekept quite a bit.
• Hard to find the right contact instead of just any contact.
• Getting meetings booked with the decision makers is the challenge for us.
• We struggle with finding and reaching the right decision makers.
• Difficulty reaching decision makers.
• Finding the right target audience.

C. Outdated or Ineffective Methods (Traditional Companies)

• The tactics pre-COVID that were working somewhat effectively have dried up because everybody adopted them and now the amount of noise that’s being pushed on your potential buyer has also expanded exponentially.
• The willingness or demand to meet in person and congregate in a lot of the venues that we used to be able to engage with folks at basically through COVID died and people just aren’t interested in them anymore.
• Difficulty getting organic reach on Instagram.
• We set up like 50 LinkedIn accounts and got a bunch of nothing.

4. Past Failures & Skepticism

Prospects who have been burned by other agencies or their own failed initiatives, leading to distrust.

• They’ve gone through five different lead gen companies, either producing junk leads or no leads.
• Over the years, I’ve tried different lead generation services, but for the most part, they’re not successful.
• Current BDR vendor’s output is consistently below the promised 30 meetings per month, only delivering 10-12.
• Sporadic performance issues with current outbound vendor.
• Bad luck choosing vendors.
• Past email vendors overpromised and underdelivered.
• We have not received the volume or quality of leads we were looking for from previous agencies.
• The quality and volume of leads from the third-party lead generation service wasn’t there for the expense.
• Engaged with a couple of agencies but didn’t have the expected results because they were Latin American agencies targeting North American companies.
• We’ve had fail after fail after fail with website revamps.

5. Market & Competitive Challenges

External factors related to the market, competition, and the prospect’s brand positioning.

A. Saturated or Difficult Markets

• Differentiating from other MSPs in a saturated, commoditized market.
• Customers reluctant to switch due to commodity nature.
• Bigger companies are going to be pretty embedded with their existing payment provider.
• We have some big competition.
• Market saturation with digital marketing vendors.
• The French market is a little bit tough to crack because people are very skeptical.

B. Brand & Awareness Issues

• Brand is not well known in the US.
• Lack of brand awareness in the HR marketplace.
• We want to get into international market like US, Middle East, and Africa.

C. Educating the Market

• Educating prospects about the problem your solution solves.
• New concept (cash discounting) requires significant education.
• Pushback or confusion about using AI for outbound.
• It’s hard for us to sell it out in the world that we are over 50% less than one of these people that can do it in-house.

D. Long Sales Cycles & Timing

• Longer sales cycles (2-3 months) if there is no urgent need to switch.
• Long sales cycle (four months).
• Must catch prospects at the right time given long-term MSP contracts.
• Seasonal and cyclical buying window in K-12 (summer and holidays are often dead zones).
• Q3 is historically slow for lead generation.

6. Budget & Financial Constraints

All challenges related to money, cost, and financial pressures.

• Budgets are tight.
• We’re just bootstraps and we don’t want to go and raise capital.
• Difficulty in overcoming upfront hardware costs.
• Dependence on the transactionality that users do within the platform, making revenue very variable.
• Very cautious about upsells and renewals at this point.
• Existing vendor is fairly pricey.
• It’s really just the cost to acquire the customer and get them signed up, and then it’s just on.
• High cost of Google and Facebook ads.
• Money is tight.
• Budget is low.
• Very limited marketing budget.

7. Technical & Tooling Issues

Specific problems with technology, data, and tools that hinder sales and marketing efforts.

A. Email Deliverability

• Our email deliverability sucks and nothing gets opened.
• Email deliverability issues in education due to filters and whitelisting.
• My main domain email has been marked as spam.
• There might be some gremlin lurking in our email server due to rebranding.
• Outlook, Mimecast, and Proofpoint are affecting deliverability.
• Emails are just going to spam with HubSpot sequences.
  • Underlying problem: Hubspot sends all emails through what’s called a ‘cloud relay’, which all the major ESPs have a HUGE RED X on, saying do not pass go, do not collect $200.
• We’re using Apollo but its all going to spam
  • Underlying problem: Prospect is probably not doing warmup, probably sending it all through their primary corporate domain (homepage)
• Sending from primary
  • HUGE HUGE HUGE issue.
    • Wow, you’re sending all that. CEO to investor emails, transaction emails, forgot my password, invite links, all that stuff is going straight to spam.
    • Look the most cutting-edge way to do this is a 4 part email system on 4 different domains: 1) Internal (primary domain), 2) Transactional (nuts and bolts, product emails), 3) Marketing (CRM, newsletter, drip), 4) Secondary Outbound (Hyperspect)

B. Tool & Platform Problems

• Tracking mechanism is not advanced, no dealer management system.
• Leads have to be manually entered into CRM.
• Issues with both Smartlead and Infinlead recently, like warm up issues and sending limits issues.
• One downside with HubSpot is not being able to manipulate gross margin in the quote builder.
• HubSpot meeting link is the only tool that I can easily track for reporting purposes.
• Calendly does not flow in the non-host owner of the link into HubSpot.
• Open rate is less than 15% with HubSpot.
• Salesloft / Outreach.io (Sales Engagement Platform) NOT designed to be an outbound BDR tool,

C. Data & Tracking Issues

• A lot of things can get lost in translation.
• Apple has changed the way that they handle mobile emails on an Apple device, which affects click rate tracking.
• We don’t track opens and clicks because there’s negative deliverability impacts in email for tracking both of those things.
• That list is kind of old at this point and probably needs some updating.
• Sales i data was out of date.
• Data reconciliation on those leads was a nightly pain in my neck.
• Everybody suffers from the quality of the data.
• Hubspot clutter (tons of contacts, companies, duplicates, BS)
  • Paying per contact? ouch

8. Internal Resource & Capacity Constraints

Challenges stemming from a lack of internal manpower, skills, or ability to execute.

• Lack of specialized content team
  • “I have nobody to write outbound sequences”
  • “I have no time to write outbound sequences”
  • “My people are not good at writing outbound sequences”
• Fixing this workload problem around copywriting.
• I hired a copywriter and then he bailed like two days later.
• Right now I’m pretty much the only person that can do the really complex campaigns.
• Velocity and the number of campaigns that need to get out the door.
• Copywriter can’t keep up alone.
• The most pressing kind of bottleneck for us right now is actually just copy execution.
• No team of BDRs for prospecting.
• I’m the director of sales here, but really, I’m pretty much the sales team.
• We don’t have the horsepower on the phone to reach the schools we are working with now.
• We don’t have the time and resources to handle lead generation ourselves.
• Limited marketing resources.

#Common Prospect Goals

#

1. Lead Volume & Pipeline Generation

This is the most common and immediate tactical need. Prospects want a predictable flow of opportunities to keep their sales team busy and productive.

A. Specific Meeting & Lead Quotas

• Get 10-15 net new meetings/leads per week.
• Secure 30 qualified meetings or demos per month.
• Provide 3-5 high-quality leads per sales rep per week/day.
• Fill the sales team’s calendars every week.
• Generate 20+ leads per month.
• Have 5-10 qualified sales conversations every week.

B. General Pipeline Health & Consistency

• Generate a consistent, steady flow of inbound or outbound leads.
• Ensure there is always something new in the funnel to avoid lulls.
• Increase the overall volume and quality of leads.
• Double or triple the current lead count.
• Feed the sales team with qualified leads.

2. Revenue & Business Growth

This is the strategic, high-level outcome prospects are seeking. It’s about scaling the entire business, not just the sales pipeline.

• Duplicate and triplicate company revenue.
• Grow from a $5 million company to a $10-15 million company.
• Scale revenue to as close to $100 million as possible.
• Grow to 40 or 50 clients by the end of the year.
• Secure at least 3 new deals per month.
• Increase the overall customer base.
• Achieve a fast growth rate and get a huge growth in users.

3. Process & Efficiency Improvement

Prospects want to fix their broken or inefficient internal processes. They want to automate, scale, and allow their team to focus on their most valuable tasks.

• Automate lead generation and build a self-running lead generation machine.
• Improve the repeatability and predictability of the sales process.
• Allow Account Executives and Business Development Managers to focus on closing deals, not prospecting.
• Streamline lead generation efforts and simplify lead management.
• Spend resources on direct sales and support, not on building an internal BDR team.
• Increase the efficiency of the lead generation process and improve ROI on marketing spend.

4. Market Expansion & Strategic Targeting

These goals are about entering new markets, targeting new customer segments, or increasing brand presence.

A. Entering New Markets & Verticals

• Increase brand awareness and presence in the US market.
• Break into new markets (e.g., sheet metal, biopharma, healthcare).
• Expand beyond the current core customer base (e.g., academic libraries).
• Target specific verticals like single-family home developers or e-commerce.

B. Improving Targeting & Messaging

• Reach out directly to end-users and technology decision-makers.
• Get super niche and target specific personas feeling a clear pain point.
• Drive more value and engagement in outreach to increase meeting rates.
• Identify and target “whale” accounts for big wins.

5. Finding a Solution & Proving ROI

These prospects are in an evaluation phase. Their primary goal is to find a reliable partner and validate that the investment will pay off before committing long-term.

• Find a solution that is consistent, delivers, and really works.
• Decide whether to build an in-house marketing team or outsource it.
• Understand the lead cost and the break-even ROI.
• Try the service for a pilot period (e.g., three months) and then re-evaluate.
• Find a partner who can help effectively and scalably generate leads.
• Successfully close deals from outbound efforts to prove the model works.

#Common Prospect Questions

1. The Core Service: What It Is & How It Works

This group covers the fundamental questions about your service, the definition of a “lead,” and the handoff process.

A. General Service & Value Proposition

• I was just wondering what your services kind of are, what you offer?
• I was interested to hear about what your stuff does and how it works?
• So, this is a purely as a service, meeting ready leads, so you generate and give it to us?
• What’s your process and what would we be on the receiving end with that quote-unquote qualified lead?
• How does the process fully work?
• How does the lead generation process work? (x2)
• Can you give me some context?
• What did you want to show me? Is your LLM working?
• What’s the name of your company for starters?
• What is the name of your company, by the way?
• How is this different between, let’s say, Apollo or ZoomInfo and all the other platforms that do this?

B. Defining a “Meeting-Ready Lead”

• Can you elaborate on what a meeting-ready lead really means?
• Can you show me again the definition of lead?
• So when you say meeting ready, so you’re going to send them to me, and then it’s up for me to accept or decline, and if I accept it, I pay even if I can’t get the person to schedule with me?
• What do we qualify as a meeting booked and are cancellations included?
• In all cases like that, does that still count as a lead that we have to pay for, or I just wanted to get that sorted.
• What happens regarding payment if we get a lead that is not qualified?
• So you are talking about what will be the percentage of cost per lead. It is, you are not talking about the lead conversions. You’re only giving a suspect lead, correct?
• How do you handle BANT qualification if it’s up to me to approve or reject the lead?
• What if you give me a meeting ready lead and then they never respond to my salesperson?

C. The Handoff Process

• How does the lead handoff process work? (x12)
• How does the lead handoff proces work? (x3)
• How am I getting those leads?
• How has the handoff process been going?
• When we get this lead, how do we book the call with them?
• Would you have already reached out and gotten a response before transferring leads to us?
• When you give me the meeting ready lead, do you give me email and phone number?
• From my understanding is like basically the only thing we’ll see is, you know, a company in Florida wants to take a meeting. Natalie gets an email and she says, like, OK, I accept this lead. And then she then starts engaging with them to book a meeting. Is that fair to describe?

2. Pricing, Contracts & Agreements

All questions related to cost, pricing models, contract terms, trials, and negotiation.

A. Pricing Model & Structure

• What is the pricing model you guys have?
• How do you guys price for this?
• How does pricing work? (x2)
• How does pricing and the cost structure look?
• How do you structure your deal for a project?
• How do you set up your offer?
• Is it performance model, or is it there’s a retainer and a monthly fee?
• Is the pricing strictly based on meetings booked, or is there a base retainer plus performance model?
• Do you guys ever put in place a revenue share model?
• What’s your costs are involved around that?
• So it’s a $3,500 setup fee, $500 monthly fee, plus cost per lead, correct?
• So you guys charge $3,500 upfront, and then the fee is $500 for the APIs. And when you get the leads, like $250 for each lead. Am I right?

B. Cost Per Lead (CPL)

• What is the price per lead? (x11)
• How much do you charge per lead? (x2)
• What is the cost per lead? (x2)
• What kind of performance fee do you charge?
• What’s your fee for the actual lead that you buy?
• Now you said something around one set up charge, and what will be the per lead you’re going to charge?
• And this range that you have put there for the lead from $100 to $250, what it depends on?
• What’s the range of that CPL typically?
• What is the average number you decide on per lead with the companies that you already have signed up?
• Do you think, like, what do you think is like, is the median price, the 300 a lead?
• What do you charge $200 for, like who are your clients that are paying 200 for a lead?
• But it’s not like not closed lead, like per lead accepted?

C. Setup Fees, Retainers & Other Costs

• Are there any additional setup fees?
• Does it have a monthly fee?
• Is it performance model, or is it there’s a retainer and a monthly fee?
• What that looks like if we do the initial $3,500 investment, we go ahead and now we’re paying a $500 a month data fee…
• My question was how much it was upfront, but it’s 3,500 right?
• What is an expectation of a small startup company spending per month in acquiring the leads?

D. Contracts, Trials & Commitments

• Do you have a term? Are we signing for a specific term?
• What is the contract length?
• Do you have an annual contract? Is it month to month?
• What about term? Is it just month to month?
• Do we have to sign up for like a close committed minimum time or is this on a monthly basis?
• Are there like fixed contract terms in terms of dates, you’re locked in for a year, two years?
• And what Curies asks is for a minimum mandatory period of three months?
• Is there a way we can come up with an agreement to test and see how it works?
• Can we do some type of flexible or trial engagement given we’ve never done this before?
• Do you have like a free trial?
• How would you think through doing this like three month pilot for us?
• Are we signing a three-month trial, then $500/month plus a CPL?
• Is there like a minimum number of leads I have to accept in a month?

E. Negotiation & Flexibility

• Is there flexibility or room for negotiation on pricing?
• One-time cost is something that can we somehow reduce it or just pay a portion of it?
• Can we work with this scenario where we lower the fixed cost and we increase the affordable one?
• Is there any way to reduce that 3K commitment or that’s a non-starter?
• Is 3,000 like a cut thing? Like, you cannot go below that?
• The startup cost, is that negotiable or even waived at times?
• What if instead of the $200 a lead, we did $300 until we hit that $3,000 threshold and it went down to $200? Would that be something that you guys would potentially entertain?
• Is the $300 per lead rate firm?
• Can you beat the price we’re currently paying for leads?
• Would you do a CPL for 50 bucks?
• Is there a sort of a volume discount that we could get if we were to approach this on a higher volume level?

3. Methodology: How You Generate Leads

Questions about your process, channels, technology, and the specifics of your outreach.

A. Lead Generation Process & Channels

• How do you generate the leads?
• How are you getting the list form?
• How do you generate leads through AI and LinkedIn?
• What’s your strategy?
• What is your strategy for getting past those filters?
• How do you identify intent before reaching out?
• What channels are you looking at besides cold email?
• Is that the only channel that you guys have tried so far, apart from obviously referrals?
• What other marketing channels do you use?
• So it’s all done via email, primarily?
• Is that AI tool automating messaging on email or LinkedIn?
• As far as the AI outreach, is it just strictly email then that you guys do?

B. Outreach, Personalization & Copywriting

• How do you personalize your outreach? (x2)
• How are you going about personalization in your outreach? (x8)
• Can you personalize the outreach based on company description, website content, and LinkedIn profile?
• How’s the copy done?
• Who does the message appear from?
• How does it look?
• Is the brand look consistent?
• What does it look like when you do it for a client?
• When you’re doing that initial reach, are you doing that, I guess, representing us and our brand, or are you doing that under the Hyperscale brand and then sending that connection over?
• Are you going to still run some of the master templates by us for approval and sign off?
• How do we iterate on messaging?

C. Volume & Scale

• How many emails do you send per month?
• How many emails are you sending per day?
• How many emails do you send out? Or how many do you shoot to send out? And how many waves?
• What kind of volume of outreach are you doing each month?
• How many people are you contacting on our behalf?
• How many people are you generally contacting in a three month period?
• Are there any limits on the number of emails that you guys will send out?
• What does ‘at scale’ mean?
• On average, how many follow-up emails do you send after the initial?

D. Technology, Tools & Technical Details

• Do you integrate with HubSpot?
• Does your service integrate well with HubSpot or Salesforce?
• Is there integration with HubSpot?
• If we do the HubSpot integration, we approve and it automatically gets pushed to HubSpot?
• Do you recommend HubSpot for our CRM needs?
• Do you guys use a CRM?
• Which CRM?
• Do you have any resources on domain filters, spinning out different domains, and email warming? (x8)
• Do you have resources on domain filters and email warming? (x2)
• How do you handle email deliverability issues?
• How do you handle catch-all emails?
• Are you using our domains, or do we need to do subdomains?
• Do we need to set up webis.something?
• Do you have a DMARC record?
• Are you sending that from similar looking domains to ours?
• So if they use Natlan valuations, that can also get banned if we just send out too much stuff?
• Is the platform itself managing email sequences, or does it just send one email and then you get one response that triggers the yes or no?

4. Client Involvement & Responsibilities

These questions clarify what the prospect needs to provide or do during the process.

A. Providing Lists & Contacts

• Do we provide the lists or do you? (x11)
• Do you provide the lists or do we?
• In terms of obtaining email lists, do you guys source that for us or use our internal contacts?
• Do you rely on us to provide lists or do you find the contacts?
• Are we giving you the brands, or do you find them?
• Am I providing you my database of contacts, or are you just going at it with company names or the industry and the titles and doing the data scraping?
• Can we just provide the domains that should be used?
• If we provided you the list, how much would that reduce the effort and cost?
• Are you just getting your contacts from Apollo or your network that you’re reaching out to?

B. Involvement in Strategy & Copywriting

• How involved are we in the copywriting process? (x11)
• What would the process look like together for content writing and list creation?
• Could you go ahead and create the copy for this?
• Do you need input from me on any of these?
• If the marketing team or the product team is releasing anything new, that’s the only thing that comes to mind. Anything we can sort of use or tell our copywriters to incorporate into a new campaign?
• Press release bullshit isn’t useful to you, is it?

C. Onboarding & Setup

• How does your onboarding process work to define these leads?
• What would you need from me to do that?
• Anything else you need from me right now?
• Will I have anything to prepare before the next time that we talk?
• Are you going to set up our HubSpot?

5. Results, Performance & Proof

Prospects ask these questions to gain confidence in your ability to deliver. This includes metrics, case studies, and guarantees.

A. Success Rates & Performance Metrics

• What is your average conversion rate?
• Do you have the statistics on the success rates?
• What do you find from your customers that are successful with you as far as their conversion rates from those meetings to deals?
• What kind of booking rates do you get?
• What percentage of them would you say are qualified generally?
• What is the lead-to-meeting conversion rate?
• What’s your average click rate right now?
• What kind of open rates do you guys see in HubSpot? (x7)
• What are your open rates on HubSpot?
• What kind of open rates do you guys see?
• Do you have any idea what HubSpot’s deliverability looks like?
• Do you have any numbers around your typical close rate for clients?
• Any estimate on close rate?
• Out of 10 conversations, sales opportunities to be specific, how many of those move forward or become customers?
• Do you have a guesstimate of close rate for your clients?
• Explain that 90% show rate again?

B. Expected Results & Timelines

• How long does it take for a campaign to get up and running?
• How long does it typically take to see results from your lead generation efforts?
• How long does it take to see results?
• So like from your experience, how fast will we see leads?
• How fast do you consider you can start converting those leads?
• How many leads do you suggest or recommend or guarantee per month?
• How many leads do you think you can generate like that?
• How many can you produce?
• Range of leads that we should expect
• How much is it going to accelerate the growth?
• What kind of ROI can you provide?
• What’s the return on investment formula?

C. Case Studies, Testimonials & References

• Do you have any case studies or testimonials from previous clients? (x2)
• Can you provide case studies or testimonials from previous clients?
• Can you provide some case studies or success stories?
• Do you guys have like a claim to fame case study that you love talking about on sales calls?
• What are some of the most impactful transformations that maybe you’ve seen personally or are there any great case study stories that you guys like to lean on during the sales process?
• Do you have any portfolio items or previous campaigns with performance reports?
• Could you share your case studies, especially any relevant or similar to tax or financial services?
• Do you have anybody, like any referrals that you could offer that can speak to your service and long-term success with you guys?
• Could you send us a couple of references?

D. Guarantees & Assurances

• What is the assurance that it is not going to happen?
• Do you provide a guarantee on lead quality?
• What happens if the booking ratio is just shit?
• What that looks like if we do the initial $3,500 investment… and if we don’t see anything… is there anything to sort of guarantee or protect against something like that?
• What’s your gut tell you? Do you think you can help us?
• If 90% isn’t accurate, can we revisit the CPL in good faith?

6. Targeting & Industry Experience

Questions about your ideal customer, specific industries you’ve worked with, and how you’d approach their unique market.

A. Ideal Customer & Industry Experience

• Could you tell me a little bit more about the kind of clients that you typically work with?
• What kind of clients are you working with?
• What makes a good fit customer for you?
• Do you have a specific industry that you’re mainly working in or is broad?
• Would you consider that you guys have a sweet spot where if there’s this kind of business, you’re trying to do this, we can hit these out of the park?
• Have you done much work in ed tech, especially K-12?
• Have you guys done staffing companies like mine before?
• Do you have experience working with B2B companies, selling services like staff augmentation or within the software development industry?
• Are you very familiar with ERP companies?
• Do you have experience targeting e-comm?
• Do you find e-comm to be a more difficult industry for you compared to other ones or have you found success in e-comm?

B. Prospect-Specific Targeting Strategy

• Can you give me an idea of your ideal campaign approach for us?
• Do you guys target only real estate developers or do you go direct to consumer?
• In terms of the job titles that you target, is it office managers? Is it operations teams, facility management, C level?
• Could we target businesses based on a certain estimated processing volume?
• Do we want to tailor the messaging for each one of those individual sub-segments within this investment targeting group?
• Is it enough of a differentiator in your mind if we’re standing up a Boston office?
• Do you guys only serve the Nashville area or how do you think about geographical targeting or reach?
• Are you limited to a particular geography?

7. About Your Company

Questions prospects ask to vet your company’s stability, size, and internal structure.

• How large is your company?
• How many employees do you have?
• How much revenue do you bring in a year?
• How many customers do you guys work with right now? (x2)
• Any idea about retention or like, are people churning?
• Do they stick around for a year or what’s the retention?
• Do you feel good about the growth metrics?
• Are you the only salesperson?
• Are you going to be the one taking the calls?
• If we did sign up, who would be our direct contact and where would they sit?

8. Next Steps & Follow-Up

Questions that signal the end of the call and what happens next.

• What’s the next step typically on your guys’s end?
• What are the next steps?
• How do we go from here?
• So what you do is, Chris, you can just send a mail with your details, the proposal, because in your website is also not talking very clearly about the service what you are offering.
• And I assume you can kind of send over all the info about what we’re talking about today too, correct?
• Can you send a one-pager summarizing pricing and onboarding so I can share it with my CEO?
• Can you like send like a recap with some bullet points of our meeting today?
• Would you be able to send me a couple of email examples, like even just kind of like hooky cutter with ERP, just kind of what that would look like?
• Could you screenshot the lead email format so I can see what info is provided before I approve or deny?

9. Logistics & Clarifications

A catch-all for meeting logistics, technical issues, and simple clarifying questions.

• Can you hear me now?
• Is Doug joining us or is it just us today?
• Is it better to be on Zoom for this or can we just be on cell phone?
• Do we need to see anything right now or no?
• Can I have a copy of this recording?
• Do you want to reschedule? I mean, would that be better?
• Any questions on that?
• Do you have any questions for me?
• Can you dive into that a little more? I’m not sure I followed you. Can you just explain that?
• What do you mean by that?
• What is that?
• Did you look at my website even on sjcomputers.com?
• Any other last minute questions for me?

#Common Prospect Objections

1. Pricing & Budget Objections

These are direct challenges to the cost of the service, the pricing model, or the prospect’s ability to pay.

A. Direct Cost & Affordability

• The price is too high.
• The price is a little high for our budget.
• $250 a lead is pretty high.
• I can’t pay 325. It’s a lot.
• The price is a lot more, I guess, than what I’ve been seeing around.
• 3000 a month seems just a little high for the pure sales cold outreach.
• I’m also not willing to pay astronomical rates for a small list. I’m not paying that.
• The price per meeting is too high compared to our current internal cost structure.
• It might be hard to convince internal stakeholders that $300 per lead is a good value.
• We have budget, but we have limited budget, and we’re really trying to watch our spend.
• We can’t afford a full BDR at this point.
• We have next to no marketing budget at the moment.
• Not really in the budget right now, maybe this isn’t the right time.

B. Pricing Model & Risk Aversion

• I’m interested, but I can’t pay any retainer. It’s all performance play.
• Candidly, the upfront cost is probably a little bit more. It makes me a little more timid. I can swallow a higher cost per lead than probably that upfront cost.
• I prefer to pay more in the variable piece of it rather than the fix, but only for the proof of concept.
• The fixed costs potentially could be a problem.
• If it is a service from you, it is set up charge is not our problem. It is your problem.
• I wasn’t expecting the one-time setup fee.
• We can incentivize in other ways like commission on the deal. I don’t know if that’s something that you guys do, but that’s a way that we can offset the 3k.
• I would rather do some kind of kicker at the end. Like if I get a project, you guys can get a piece of the project forever or something.
• The CEO is really cheap and really wants it to be performance based.

2. Skepticism from Past Bad Experiences

This is one of the most common and powerful objections, rooted in being burned by other agencies or failed internal efforts.

• We’ve tried various versions of this in the past that haven’t worked, so there’s always a concern about whether it will work.
• We had a bad experience with a previous lead generation company.
• I’ve tried other companies and they all went nowhere.
• We tried outbound in the past, didn’t work.
• We had a similar approach with a different company a while back, and we had to end that relationship. The biggest issue was for the quality of leads.
• I’ve had really bad luck choosing vendors and I’m a pretty intelligent guy.
• The owner is super over pay per click. We’ve done it, we’ve spent so much money, and it feels like we just flushed it.
• We paid a lot of money and got shit.
• Usually we’ve used other companies that walk us through this and they can’t deliver.
• Zoom Info was a big, fat zero for us over a course of a year.
• There isn’t a client, probably, that you spoke to that has not got shafted somehow with these types of tests.

3. Status Quo & Internal Team

Objections that claim “we’re already doing this” or “we don’t need you.”

• We have a team in place already to handle this.
• We already have an in-house team for lead generation.
• That seems pretty similar to what we are already doing so I’m not sure how much value that would add.
• We already have a lead generation strategy in place.
• We’re not actively looking for lead gen agencies; it’s not something we’d actually go look for.
• We do have a second salesperson to help out.
• Our sales team lacks the bandwidth to do targeted outreach.
• Our sales team is focused on demos and closing deals, leaving little time for prospecting.

4. Trust, Risk & Value Proposition

These objections question the fundamental value, quality, and trustworthiness of your service.

A. Lack of Trust & Fear of Being Scammed

• So many companies… create the same lead and give it to four companies. What is the assurance that it is not going to happen?
• I don’t have any understanding if I pay 2500 how many leads quality leads I will get. There is no clarity.
• Something we’re trying to avoid is like going through these lulls where sometimes we don’t receive any leads. You know, and that’s, I think, a big concern of ours is just trying to invest in a company that we’re just unsure is going to be able to deliver.
• We can’t miss on it. We’re not in a position right now that we can afford to be negligent with any money.
• If it doesn’t work out, I’ll get a bunch of shit for it not working out.

B. Doubts About Effectiveness & ROI

• We are unsure about the effectiveness of outbound sales outreach.
• I have this inherent thought in my mind that is that people don’t give a shit about what we do.
• I just don’t believe that any of them actually want the thing that we have.
• It’s a matter of whether it is worth it to pay as much just for the proof of concept.
• We’re just trying to see if it’s worth it for the lead cost.
• We need to make sure our funding truly goes towards impactful initiatives and delivers the ROI we need.
• This lifetime value seems low to me.
• I’'m not convinced that lead generation will help our business.

C. Lack of Differentiation

• What sets you apart from other lead gen companies?
• The main difference I’ve noticed is booking leads directly onto the calendars of my salespeople versus you sending me a meeting ready lead.
• Another thing is they could have an agency, and it’s like, why would they switch to us?
• I don’t know what the difference is between you guys and the other than the pay per lead, which is interesting.

5. Competition

Direct mentions of evaluating or working with a competitor.

• I’m currently evaluating another company called OSP Outbound Sales Pro.
• We’re considering another company called OSP Outbound Sales Pro.
• We already are happy with a vendor that we’re working with.
• We’re already working with another lead generation provider.
• We just started a relationship with a B2B marketing agency and want to see how they perform before moving forward.

6. Stalling & Timing

These are non-committal objections used to delay a decision.

• We need to discuss this internally before making a decision.
• I probably won’t commit to anything until for a week and a half.
• Our CEO is out and we need approval for the setup fee.
• It might be at least three months, three to six months before we could do it.
• I might not be the right person to be talking to for this.
• I don’t want to go ahead with this right now because I feel like I first want to finalize my work on the sales data.
• We’re just putting all of our data into HubSpot for the first time.

7. Process & Implementation Concerns

Objections related to the “how” of your service, including legality, process fit, and internal bandwidth.

• Is this legal?
• I can’t send an email to somebody unless they’ve asked to be sent an email.
• We just really want to make sure we don’t have those liability concerns.
• I don’t want existing clients to get any cold outreach from us at all.
• The objection comes in is bandwidth, being able to build this out, you know, them having the resources to be able to devote to this and to provide the attention to it.
• I can’t approve it without seeing their website. I truly need that to approve them to actually know they’re qualified, you know?
• Converting leads is going to be a real pain if they don’t use Ruby.
• The more I’m hearing about it, it’s kind of out of the purview of what my team has been hired to do. It’s purely cold outbound.
• Does it go out under our brand?
• Do we have approvals?