Short excerpt from a cold-call teardown where Morgan Ingram and Brian LaManna discuss how to handle budget questions on sales calls. Morgan notes that directly asking about budget is a bold move that may not yield an answer. Brian suggests a softer, conversational approach: ask about past evaluation processes and stakeholders involved, solicit the prospect's perspective on potential value, and then propose next steps to facilitate future conversations.
Hello. Hi. Hello. I know you're expecting my call. Do you have a moment to speak? I promise I'll be brief. Sure. Yeah. What's going on?
Directly asking for the budget is a very bold statement and question. Right. You know, sometimes you may not get the answer there.
I do like the confident ask for, like, hey, who controls the budget? But I don't know if that's where you want to get to because, you know, assuming they provide a name, then the call's kind of over. It's like, okay, I'll shoot them an email. As long as there's still a Persona you would ultimately want to set a meeting with, I'd ask a more, like, conversational question first. Like, hey, Morgan, completely understand when I made this call. Like, you're not the one that owns the budget. Like the science for things. Totally understand that. Curious. Have you ever evaluated different solutions in the past over the last three years of working there? Just getting a little bit more of a conversation flowing around, like how evaluations work, who all would be involved in them? And then you can make a, you know, strong recommendations that, hey, Morgan, totally understand that you're not the one finalizing the budget with that expectation. I'd love to still get your perspective to know first. Would this even be valuable to XYZ Co. And if so, can kind of talk through what that would look like to facilitate any future conversations from there. Does that sound fair?
That is like poetry. I swear, this guy can sell paper to a treat. And as we wrap up holistically, right, let's. Let's do 1 to 10. What would you rate this call?
