Selling over the phone is one of the most dreaded tasks in sales. Even some of the most experienced and successful sales reps hate trying to sell into a receiver. It’s impersonal. It’s a difficult challenge to overcome objections, get your value proposition across, and get the prospects interested in just a few short minutes, especially when they have the easy option of hanging up on you.

But selling over the phone can be effective if you get it right. If you prepare enough ahead of time, you’ll see your success rate rise. Here are five things you can do to set yourself up for selling over the phone before you pick up that receiver.

1. Practise Your Script

If you are using a script while selling over the phone, as many sales organizations do, make sure you practise it ahead of time—a lot. The last thing you want is to sound unnatural and robotic in your pitch. If you’re not using a script, then practise what you plan on saying before you pick up the phone. If you don’t take the time to learn what you need to say in an effective and efficient manner, it could come off all wrong, and damage your chances of making the sale. This happens most often when salespeople are pitching a new product or service that they’re not familiar with, and haven’t learned what they were going to say about it yet.

The more you practise, the more natural you’re going to sound, so you can have an actual conversation with the prospect. Master your words, your voice inflections, and your tone.

2. Put Everything Else Away

When you’re cold calling one prospect after another, things can get pretty boring, especially when they’re not answering or hanging up right away. This can cause you to want to multitask to keep yourself busy. But if you actually want to successfully make the sale once someone does answer the phone, you can’t multitask. You have to avoid distractions or you won’t be able to sell anything.

3. Prepare Answers to Common Sales Objections Ahead of Time

Once you hear an objection, you don’t want to be stuck speechless and without a good answer. It’s important to figure out what you’re going to say if you hear objections, before you even pick up the phone. Three of the most common objections include “send me an email,” “I don’t have time to talk,” and “I can’t make any decisions right now, let’s talk again in the future.” If you can come up with great rebuttals to these three common objections, you can keep the call going long enough to sell.

4. Motivate Yourself

We know that you probably don’t love selling over the phone. But your mindset can make or break the success of your calls. If you sound depressed and uninterested to be on the phone, your prospects will notice it in your voice and tone. Motivate yourself to try your best for every single call so that you can get your mind and mood into the right place for success.

5. Perform Pre-Call Research

Last but certainly not least, to make those cold calls a little warmer, do some research ahead of time. Find out who you’re calling, what companies they are from, what positions they hold, what their needs might be, and anything else that will help you have a more meaningful and relevant conversation. The internet is a wonderful thing, and you can use it to familiarize yourself with your prospects to make selling over the phone a little more successful by arming yourself with the right prospect information.