Human behavior is predictable. A script is a best way to standardize interaction and lead a customer to a sale. A sale may not involve an actual exchange of good or currency. A sale is a point at which the objective is achieved.
Imagine that we are asked to walk the streets and gather as many first names from strangers as possible. When a stranger shares their name with us, its a "sale".
Human interaction is predictable. If someone were to approach you and say "Hi" what is your most likely response? You are 90% likely to say "Hi" back or exercise some other kind of greeting.
If we were to develop a script, "Hi" would not be enough because our objective is to get someones first name. Therefore, we add to the script a question:
"Hi, what is your name?"
This script is an improvement upon "Hi" because it leads us to our goal of achieving our objective. If we were to exercise this script we would likely have a fair amount of people who, reject by saying "no" or ignoring us. Others will object with a question "why are you asking?".
To minimize rejection and objection we can work-in non verbal scripted actions such as:
Smiling
Being excited
Excising a soft - non threatening voice.
These non verbal scripted actions would improve our "close" ratio. Because we know that people are more likely to volunteer information to the people they know, we can modify the script the following way:
"Hi, my name is John, what is your name?"
Combined with non verbal scripted actions and a script above, we are likely to achieve a high "close ratio".
Scripts are an central to cold calling and sales in general. A well prepared script anticipates objections. A good script will deal with those objections effectively while steering clear of situation that can result in an outright rejection.
It is important to keep statistics to evaluate how effective components of the script are. For example, if I were to stop smiling in the example above, how many "sales" would I lose? How many objections would I gain? A good script should be closing minimum 20% of pitches.