7 steps to strategically prepare for a sales call

Whether you’re a seasoned sales representative or a marketing newcomer, each conversation with a potential customer is an opportunity to nurture a lasting relationship and drive business goals forward. 

But without a clear strategy and solid call preparation, you may leave customers unengaged or unconvinced, leading to lost sales and revenue.

So how do you ensure you’re fully equipped to meet—and exceed—a prospect’s needs and expectations before you’re on the call?

This article gives you 7 high-impact steps to prepare for a successful sales call with a new prospect. We also cover

• How to obtain strategic contact insights before the call

• How to incorporate storytelling into your sales pitch

• How to anticipate and manage your potential customer’s objections or hesitations

1. Research your new prospect

A strong foundation for any sales call begins with thoroughly understanding your lead’s baseline needs and goals. In fact, Crunchbase reports that top sellers spend an average of six hours per week researching their leads.

Conducting detailed user research about your contact’s industry, company objectives, overall customer journey, and specific market challenges enables you to structure a customized, targeted conversation that increases your chances of closing the deal. 

Strategies for researching your contact before a sales call

• Leverage professional networking platforms: use tools like LinkedIn's Sales Navigator or Lusha to gather detailed information about your contacts, like their professional activities, industry, and network

• Understand the company’s finances: review public financial reports using databases like Bloomberg Terminal or S&P Capital IQ to understand company performance, growth trajectory, and key priorities

• Review past interactions: use CRM software like HubSpot to track previous sales conversations or marketing interactions. Then, combine these insights with behavior analytics platforms like Contentsquare to spot trends and patterns.

💡 Pro tip: use the Contentsquare-HubSpot integration to supercharge your sales call strategy.

Streamline qualitative and quantitative insights from Contentsquare’s Session Replay and Surveys tools right into your HubSpot contact timeline, leading to critical sales information like

• The specific product features your prospect engages with most frequently

• The website content that captures your prospect’s interest

• Any previous comments they've made about your product or service

Then, use Hubspot’s CRM features to

• Segment your prospects into lists based on user behavior to trigger automatic marketing flows and tailor the user experience

• Build automatic notifications when a session replay of a highly engaged prospect is available, allowing a more timely review

• Share survey responses and session replay links with your sales team when contacts are showing signs of frustration, so you can follow up quickly and with clear context

Easily send survey responses and session replay links with your teams with the Contentsquare x Hubspot integration

2. Master your product knowledge

According to HubSpot, just 34% of prospects are ‘very knowledgeable’ about a company before a salesperson makes the first contact. Therefore, it’s crucial to know your product inside and out and concisely articulate its unique value proposition.

This not only ensures you provide accurate and transparent information but also enables you to showcase how your product or service directly meets your contact’s specific needs, keeping you agile and responsive throughout the conversation. 

Strategies to master your product knowledge before a sales call

• Immerse yourself in product resources: take advantage of product training resources or company webinars to stay up to date on key features and benefits

• Understand your competition: review competitor analysis reports to understand who your competitors are and what products they offer to develop strong counterpoints

• Stay current with industry trends: monitor industry news or use business intelligence tools to understand how your product fits into the broader market or addresses a market gap

Contentsquare University’s library of on-demand courses and webinars offers a wealth of product information, including growth stories, insider hacks, and conversion-boosting tips

3. Set clear call objectives

Setting an agenda and defining objectives for your call will guide the flow of your conversation and set explicit expectations for your lead.

Clear objectives also provide a basis for evaluating the success of the conversation post-call, enabling you to track progress, measure performance against desired outcomes, and refine your approach for future interactions.

Strategies to define objectives for a sales call

• Benchmark past performance: use tools like Salesforce or HubSpot to analyze historical data from previous calls with similar prospects to set realistic goals

• Outline an agenda: create a clear and concise agenda before your call, including your objectives, key talking points, and the desired outcome of the conversation

• Assign team roles: use project management software like Asana or Monday.com to assign specific responsibilities to each team member on the call, ensuring clear communication and a unified front

Asana offers a pre-sales support template to optimize accountability, organization, and collaboration for sales calls

4. Anticipate customer objections and hesitations

Every sales and marketing person inevitably encounters lead objections or skepticism. Identifying these concerns beforehand ensures you maintain control of the conversation with persuasive responses that are well-articulated and genuine, alleviating any doubts or hesitations your potential customer may have. 

Strategies to anticipate customer objections before a sales call

• Seek guidance: ask members of your sales or customer support team about common objections or pain points they encounter and how they’ve addressed them

• Review user feedback: collect and review customer feedback from questionnaires, surveys, or feedback widgets to understand common concerns your target audience has while interacting with your product or service

• Identify areas of friction: analyze recordings (or replays) and heatmaps of your target market to spot pain points—and then use these insights to proactively address solutions during your call 

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare segments and filters to anticipate your contact’s objections by uncovering nuanced, lead-specific patterns in your replays and heatmap data.

For example, if your company is looking to drive up sales, filtering replays and heatmaps to show data from your highest-converting clients reveals user behaviors and preferences unique to this segment. You can then tailor your messaging to home in on what your customers love most about your product, see the paths they take on your website before converting, and let these insights inform your future optimizations.

Add filters to your session replay data to dig even deeper into the nuanced behaviors and pain points of prospective customers

5. Prepare engaging questions

Engaging questions demonstrate your genuine interest in understanding your contact’s needs and challenges while creating an interactive environment that encourages them to disclose more information. 

This approach empowers you to tailor your solutions and recommendations to your lead’s specific requirements while demonstrating your expertise.

Strategies to prepare the right questions for a sales call

• Adapt your questions: avoid a structured script or checklist; instead, approach the call as a two-way conversation, keeping questions open-ended and adaptable based on your prospect’s feedback

• Address user goals: tailor questions that address your prospect’s objectives (see step #1) or aspirations—and then highlight how your solution leads them to success

• Assess the sales funnel: identify where your prospect is in the sales funnel—and then customize your questions based on that stage to guide them closer to conversion

💡 Pro tip: unsure which questions to ask during your sales call? Use Contentsquare AI to fast-track your question-building strategy.

No matter where your prospective customer is in the sales funnel, Contentsquare AI saves you hours of research by carefully crafting sales call questions around any goal. 

Maybe you’re wondering what would convince a lead in the awareness stage to convert. Simply tell Contentsquare AI what you want to achieve—and watch the magic happen as it generates a list of personalized questions.

Note: this is a free feature that comes with the Contentsquare Surveys tool, but you can also use it to generate questions for your sales calls and user interviews.

Contentsquare AI creates targeted questions based on the goal of your sales call

6. Curate a story

Product storytelling goes beyond presenting data—it requires creating a compelling narrative that engages your contact on a deeper level, tapping into their emotions and inspiring action. 

Katie Deloso, Co-Founder at Knurture, goes as far as to say, “Forget about facts, figures, charts, and statistics. It’s the fastest way to get people to tune out…your goal should be to grab and hold people’s attention by creating an emotional response.” 

By homing in on the ‘why’ behind your product or service, not just the ‘what’, you invite your leads to envision their future enhanced by your product’s unique solution.

Strategies to build a product narrative for a sales call

• Highlight success stories: weave in case studies to show how your product has solved practical, real-world challenges, paying special attention to highlight narratives and testimonials that address your contact’s pain points

• Emphasize emotional appeal: identify the emotions your product or service evokes—relief, joy, satisfaction, peace of mind—and then infuse your pitch with creative assets—copy, graphics, videos, color palettes—that create these sentiments

• Leverage user personas: utilize user personas to craft relatable narratives that mirror your contact’s individual needs and challenges. 

⚠️ Caveat: if you notice your lead responding more strongly to quantitative data, incorporate tools like Contentsquare Dashboards into your sales call planning to visually represent your metrics.

While traditional analytics only give you the raw numbers, Dashboards shows you big-picture pattern visualization and detailed data insights, so you can dive into as much—or as little—detail as your sales prospect prefers.

Contentsquare Dashboards provides a comprehensive data overview by visualizing patterns over time and tracking individual data points

7. Learn and adapt 

Regularly reviewing your sales call results helps you identify areas for improvement and modify your approach based on feedback and experience. This ongoing learning process also ensures you remain agile in changing markets or shifting business needs.

Strategies to improve your sales call performance

• Embrace constructive feedback: embrace giving and receiving feedback as part of your improvement journey by encouraging honest, constructive dialogue with clients, colleagues, and stakeholders 

• Record and review calls: use tools like Contentsquare Interviews to record sales calls, then assess your call performance and pinpoint optimization opportunities

• Experiment with your approach: A/B test different pitch strategies, emotional hooks, or question formats to identify what resonates best with your prospects and yields the most successful results

💡 Pro tip: supercharge your sales calls with Contentsquare’s Interviews tool. 

Use Interviews to conduct, record, and transcribe your sales call (with permission from the interviewee, of course), so you can focus on what matters the most: your prospective client. 

Afterward, share the recording with your team to compare notes, promote collaboration, and unlock actionable insights that drive conversions. 

Contentsquare’s Interviews tool turns video call insights into actionable sales strategies that impress prospects and drive revenue

Prioritize your prospect in your sales strategy

Closing a sale is about more than just selling a product or service—it’s about understanding your prospect, anticipating their needs, and then providing them with a personalized solution. 

Especially in competitive markets and newer industries, delivering a tailored experience sets you apart from the competition, leading to increased conversions and happy customers.

FAQs about preparing for a sales call