Words to avoid on a cold call

A call is almost never lost on an argument. It is lost on an opening phrasing that puts the balance of power on the wrong side, and that the person saying it stopped hearing a long time ago through sheer repetition.

None of what follows is dogma. Every word listed below comes with what it triggers in the listener, and with its exact replacement.

The words to replace, in one table

Why a single word gets you hung up on

In the first few seconds, the person on the other end is not judging your offer. They are filing your call. There are only two folders: a professional with a reason to call, or someone selling something. The filing is done on signals of form, not of substance, because no signal of substance has arrived yet.

Apologising words are the clearest signal of the two. Someone with a legitimate reason to call does not open by apologising for calling. By apologising, you supply the evidence yourself, before your first sentence is finished.

British phone manners make this harder rather than easier. “Sorry” is the national reflex, used to soften, to interrupt, to get past someone in a corridor. On a cold call it stops being politeness and becomes a status marker: it tells the listener you consider yourself the one in the wrong. Courtesy is not the problem, and nobody is asking you to be brusque. What costs you the call is apologising for the call itself.

The words that apologise

Sorry, bother, disturb. “Sorry to bother you” and “sorry to disturb you” both ask a question you do not want answered. They also trigger a reflex: the natural British reply to “is this a bad time?” is “well, actually…”. You have handed over the easiest exit line there is, and you handed it over yourself.

Just, quick, little. Three shrinking words that claim to reduce the cost of the call and mostly reduce its importance. “I’ve just got a quick little question” announces three times over that what follows is negligible. “Just” is the worst of them because it is invisible: “I’m just calling to…”, “I just wanted to check…”, “just following up”. Strike it out of every sentence you have written down and read them again. Not one of them loses a thing.

“How are you today?” The single most recognised opening of a cold call in the United Kingdom. It asks for a familiarity you have not earned yet, and everyone who has ever been called at their desk knows exactly what comes after it. Same verdict for “I hope you’re well” and “how’s your week going?”. Save the small talk for the second call, when there is something real to be warm about.

The second version is not more aggressive, it is simply shorter. It states a name, a company, a duration and a decision that belongs to the prospect. Nothing in it asks for permission to exist.

The words that hand over a way out

Conditionals and hypotheticals are the two great suppliers of exit doors. “If you were ever interested, we could possibly look at setting something up” carries four markers of uncertainty and not a single ask. The prospect is not being asked for anything, so the cheapest answer is no answer at all.

“I don’t suppose…” deserves a mention of its own, because it sounds courteous and is pure self sabotage. “I don’t suppose you’d have five minutes?” has already supplied the expected reply. So has “you wouldn’t happen to know who handles this, would you?”. Ask the question straight: “who looks after this at your end?”.

Interested is the last one, and the most common. “Would you be interested in this?” is a closed question put to someone who does not yet know what the subject is. The default answer is no, and the default answer is rational. Replace it with a question about their current situation, which costs nothing to answer and tells you whether there is anything to talk about.

The hard sell words

Some words are not wrong, they are dated. “An amazing offer”, “a unique opportunity”, “I can do you a special price” belong to a register the listener associates with doorstep selling, whatever the quality of what comes next. The word arrives before the argument does, and the argument never recovers.

Solution is the quietest case of the lot. The word has become so generic that it points at nothing. Name the thing instead: a dialler, a mobile app, a CRM connector. Precision reads as more professional than abstraction, and it also has the advantage of being checkable.

The same applies to the office vocabulary that has drifted into sales calls: reaching out, touching base, circling back, exploring synergies. None of them describes an action. “I’m calling you” and “I’ll send you the price list on Thursday” both describe one.

Three false taboos

Three words appear on nearly every list of things you must never say on a call, and none of them belongs there.

• “Price”. Avoiding it suggests the subject is awkward. Give the price plainly, then stop talking. See silence in sales.
• “No”. A straight disagreement is worth more than a detour. “No, it doesn’t do that” builds more credibility than three sentences of manoeuvring, and it makes everything else you say more believable.
• “Problem”. Perfectly usable as soon as it picks up a word the prospect used first. What to avoid is calling their situation a problem before they have called it one.

The verbal tics that cost you more

In practice, verbal tics cost more than vocabulary does, because they come back thirty times inside the same call. A single unfortunate word can be absorbed. A tic becomes the only thing the listener can hear.

The last line is the hardest to hear in yourself and the most expensive. Ending flat declarative sentences on a rising note, the habit linguists call the high rising terminal, converts your price, your delivery date and your reference customer into three things you appear to be seeking agreement on. Say the number, then let the sentence fall.

Spotting your own filler words

Nobody hears their own tics live, for a straightforward reason: watching for them uses the attention that should be going to the prospect. So the spotting is done afterwards, never during.

The fastest method is to read back the transcript of three calls and count. A tic usually shows up more than ten times per call, which makes it impossible to miss on a page while remaining completely inaudible to the ear that produced it. Automatic transcription makes the exercise a matter of a few minutes rather than an afternoon with a stopwatch.

One warning before you start cutting. A call stripped of every softener does not sound strong, it sounds curt, and curt gets you hung up on just as fast as apologetic does. What replaces “sorry to bother you” is not coldness, it is a reason for calling stated in one sentence. Politeness stays, in the form of a first name used correctly, a duration announced and respected, and a way out you offer at the end rather than in the first five seconds.

Once the vocabulary is cleaned up, structure takes over: the CROC method for the frame of the call, and the one page call plan to keep the right phrasings in front of you at the moment someone picks up.