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Written by Sean McPheat | 
Preparing for a sales call properly is one of the simplest things you can do to get better results and one of the most skipped steps in the process.
It doesn’t matter if you’re making your first ever prospecting call or you’ve been doing this for years. What happens before you pick up the phone often has more bearing on the outcome than anything you say during it. More than your pitch. More than how you handle objections at the end.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Most salespeople know they should prepare. Fewer actually do it well.
Preparation isn’t printing off a contact’s name and hoping for the best. It’s understanding who you’re talking to, why they might need what you’re selling, and what you’re going to say when they push back before any of that happens.
It also means having a sense of what kind of conversation you’re walking into. Are you calling someone who already knows your name and has shown some interest? Or are you going in completely cold, where you’re an unknown quantity and you’ve got about 20 seconds to earn the right to keep talking?
That distinction changes everything; how you prepare, what you lead with, how much groundwork you need to lay before the call even starts. We’ll get into the specifics of that when we cover the tips.
Get it right though, and the call stops feeling like a gamble. It starts feeling like a conversation you were actually ready for.
Good preparation touches pretty much every part of the call including your confidence, how you communicate, your ability to adapt when things go off-script, and how well you use the time you’ve got.
When you know your prospect going in, you’re not guessing. You’re not fumbling your opening because you hadn’t thought about how to start. You’re not caught off guard by a question you should have seen coming. You just show up ready and that comes across immediately.
For someone newer to sales, preparation is what quiets the nerves. It won’t get rid of them entirely, but knowing what you want to say and why gives you something solid to fall back on when the conversation doesn’t go quite how you pictured it.
For someone more experienced, it’s more about staying sharp. It’s easy to get complacent after you’ve made hundreds of calls. Preparation stops you from going through the motions and keeps the conversation feeling relevant to the actual person you’re talking to, not just the next name on your list.
And the prospect benefits either way. A prepared salesperson respects their time, gets to the point, and makes the call feel worth taking. That alone puts you ahead of most of the calls they’ll get that week.
Before anything else, ask yourself why this person is on your radar.
Have they bought from you before? Are they a new business in your area? Have they moved into a new market, or has someone new joined their team who might be looking for fresh solutions?
The answer shapes everything that follows; the angle you take, the problems you lead with, how much context you need to give before you get to the point. If you’re starting completely from scratch, it’s worth brushing up on your cold outreach approach before you dial. Without that grounding, you’re just calling a number.
Don’t just skim the homepage and call it research. Go deeper.
Look at their history, their products or services, any awards they’ve won, and how they position themselves in the market. The more you understand about what they actually do and how they do it, the easier it is to frame your conversation around something that’s relevant to them rather than rolling out the same pitch you’d give anyone.
Use what you find to shape specific questions and to work out where what you’re offering might genuinely fit.
This one gets skipped more than it should.
Looking at a prospect’s competitors gives you a view of the market from their side. What are others offering that your prospect isn’t? Where might they be falling behind, and could you help close that gap?
When you can show a prospect that you understand their competitive landscape, you stop sounding like a salesperson and start sounding like someone worth talking to.
Reviews tell you things a website never will.
If customers keep praising the same thing, that’s useful context. If there are recurring complaints or patterns of dissatisfaction, that’s potentially where you come in. Either way, knowing what people say about the company gives you a sharper starting point for the conversation.
Showing a prospect that you understand their world, including the bits they’re still working on – builds credibility quickly.
This changes your preparation more than most people realise.
A warm lead has already shown some interest. They know who you are, or they’re at least open to the conversation. You can move a bit faster, reference previous interactions, and spend less time earning the right to speak.
A cold lead is a different challenge. They don’t know you, they weren’t expecting your call, and you’ve got a very short window to make the conversation feel worth their time. Your preparation needs to be tighter, your opening sharper, and your reason for calling clear from the first sentence.If your sales pitch feels like it could use a refresh, now is the time to do it.
Know which one you’re dealing with before you pick up the phone.
Researching the company is just the start, it’s equally important to know something about the actual person you’re going to be speaking to.
LinkedIn is the obvious place to begin. Look at their role, how long they’ve been there, what they post about, what challenges they seem to be sitting with. Then Google them. See if they’ve written anything, appeared in the trade press, or picked up any industry recognition.
The goal isn’t to recite their CV back at them. It’s to walk into the conversation with enough context to make it feel personal, relevant to them as an individual, not just to the business they work for.
The quality of your questions will determine the quality of your conversation.
Go in with questions that make the prospect reflect on their current situation; where the gaps are, what better might look like. Not surface-level stuff any salesperson could ask, but questions that show you’ve done your homework and that you’re genuinely curious about where they’re at.
A good question does two things at once: it gives you useful information and it shifts how the prospect is thinking. That’s where real sales conversations tend to start.
This one catches people off guard, but it matters.
Before you call, search your own name and your company. The prospect may well Google you mid-call or before they call you back. What will they find? Does your online presence back up what you’re saying, or is there something out there that could undermine the impression you’re trying to make?
Know what they might find before they find it.
The mindset that got you ready for the first call applies to every conversation that follows.
Before you hang up, agree on a time to speak again and be clear about what happens next. A prospect who knows what to expect is much easier to re-engage than one you’ve left hanging.
Creating urgency in sales doesn’t mean applying pressure, it means giving the prospect a genuine reason to act. Treat the follow-up with the same thought and care as the initial call. That consistency is often what turns interest into a decision.
A few years ago we worked with a telesales team at a mid-sized travel business. They were busy – plenty of calls going out every day. But the conversion numbers weren’t reflecting the effort. The team were grafting. The results just weren’t following.
When we started looking into why, the answer wasn’t what anyone expected. It wasn’t confidence. It wasn’t product knowledge. It wasn’t objection handling. It was what was happening (or more accurately, what wasn’t happening) before a single call was made.
Most of the team were going into calls completely unprepared. Not cold in terms of lead temperature, but cold in terms of knowing anything about who they were calling. They hadn’t looked at the company. They hadn’t thought about what questions to ask or what might get pushed back on. They were leaning on their personality and product knowledge to carry the conversation and for a lot of calls, that just wasn’t enough.
Through our MTD Sales Development Programme, we worked with the team on building a structured preparation routine before every call. Understanding the prospect, knowing their situation, forming the right questions, and being clear on the purpose of the call before picking up the phone.
The difference showed up within weeks. Conversations became more relevant, prospects could tell that the person on the other end of the phone had actually done some homework, and objections that used to derail calls were being handled with far more confidence.
The team hadn’t suddenly become better salespeople. They’d just stopped leaving so much to chance before the call had even started.
Preparation gets talked about in every sales training conversation, yet it’s still one of the most skipped steps in the process. Strip it back and it really comes down to a handful of questions: do you know who you’re calling, why you’re calling them, what you want to find out, and what you’ll do if the conversation goes sideways? If the answer is yes (or you’re actively working towards yes) you’re already ahead of most.
A few things worth taking away from this post:
If you want to go further, our 33 sales tips and techniques covers the broader skills and habits that consistently separate the salespeople who hit their targets from those who don’t. And when you’re ready to put it all into practice with proper structure behind you, our Sales Training programmes are built around real-world selling that gets real results, including our Selling Skills Training course.
Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Sales Training
Updated on: 18 May, 2026
Originally posted: 10 January 2018
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