Industry playbooks
Energy / Utilities sales call playbooks
Your buyers are defending outage minutes to a regulator, running a transformer fleet that was installed in the same decade and is now failing in the same heatwaves, and working inside capex that was locked in years before you called. Practise here and you'll learn to handle the 'this period is committed' brush-off, the two-year pilot gate, and the chief engineer who wants to know what happens when your device fails on a live pole — before you burn a real meeting finding out.
Every call type for Energy / Utilities
Scripts, sample dialogue, objection handling and a live AI buyer for each one.
Cold Call
You dialled someone who was mid-something-else — reviewing a P&L, walking between meetings, about to eat lunch — and they picked up without knowing your name, your company, or why their phone rang. There is no prior email, no referral, no webinar download to reference. The first three to five seconds decide whether you get thirty more, and the first thirty decide whether you get a meeting. Your job on this call is not to sell the product, qualify thoroughly, or run discovery — it's to earn a next conversation by naming a problem so specifically that the prospect thinks 'how do they know that about us?' You will be interrupted, you will hear a reflex brush-off before they've processed a word you said, and you have to stay conversational through it without sounding like you're reading. Success is a calendar hold, not a good chat.
Read the playbook →Demo Call
A scheduled demo with someone who has already had the pitch conversation and said yes to seeing it — which means they are not here to learn what it does, they're here to find out where it breaks. They arrive with a mental list: how it hooks into the systems they already run, who on their team owns it once you're gone, what happens at 2am when it falls over, and how long before it's actually doing something useful. They will interrupt. Every interruption is either a buying question or a disqualification test, and your job is to answer it in their environment, not in your sandbox. If you run the standard tour — click here, then here, notice this dashboard — they go quiet, you hear typing, and you've lost the room without them ever saying no. The demo you rehearsed is a resource, not a script; the call is won by how well you handle the detours.
Read the playbook →Discovery Call
A 25-minute scheduled discovery call with a prospect who took your first touch seriously, cleared time, and showed up expecting to be diagnosed — not sold to. They already know your one-liner, so repeating it burns credibility. They have a real, layered problem: a surface symptom they'll hand over in the first two minutes, a mechanism underneath it they'll explain if you ask a decent follow-up, and a cost or political consequence they'll only name once you've proven you can hold the conversation without reaching for a demo. Your job is to earn each layer with open questions, quantify what you find, understand how a decision like this actually gets made in their shop, and leave with a specific, dated next step that both sides agreed to out loud. Pitch early, monologue, or run a BANT checklist and they will answer politely, in short sentences, and never take the next meeting.
Read the playbook →Manager Coaching Call
This is the 1:1 nobody sleeps well before. You manage a rep who has missed two quarters in a row — not catastrophically, but consistently — and you've got 30 to 45 minutes to find out whether this is a fixable skill problem, a fixable effort problem, or the start of an exit. They walk in with the excuses pre-loaded: the leads are garbage, the territory got carved up, we're 20% over on price against the challenger. Some of that is even partly true, which is what makes it hard. Underneath it, they know their discovery calls are shallow and they stopped prospecting sometime around week three of last quarter when they got busy 'working' two deals that were never going to close. They will not volunteer that. They'll only get there if you stay curious longer than they expect, look at actual numbers instead of arguing about feelings, and make it clear that admitting the real problem is safer than defending the fake one. Your job is not to win the argument, deliver a motivational speech, or put them on a PIP by minute ten. It's to get to one true root cause and leave with one changed behaviour they actually agreed to.
Read the playbook →Pricing Negotiation Call
This is the call after the technical win. They've run the eval, they've told their VP your product is the pick, and the only thing left is the number. They are not trying to talk themselves out of buying — they're trying to buy the same thing for less, and they will use every lever they have to do it: a low anchor ("honestly, we budgeted about half that"), a competitor's quote they may or may not still be considering, a case study or logo trade dangled as if it's currency, a threat to push the PO into next quarter, and long, deliberate silence after they name a figure. The trap is that they're pleasant about all of it, so it doesn't feel like a fight — it feels like a friendly conversation in which you keep making small, reasonable-sounding concessions until you've given away 30 points and gotten nothing. Your job is not to win the negotiation; it's to hold price by trading, keep the relationship warm enough that they still want to sign with you, and leave the call with a dated path to signature.
Read the playbook →Renewal Call
This is a save call, not a renewal call — the paperwork is the last five minutes, not the first five. The contract ends in six weeks, the customer has already half-decided to leave, and they're taking the meeting partly to say out loud what went wrong this year. Adoption never got past the first team, support tickets went quiet for days in Q2 during their busiest stretch, and a competitor rep has been in their inbox with a number that's 20-30% lower. They still like one or two things — usually the thing their power user built a workflow around — but they need those failures acknowledged specifically and unflinchingly before they'll entertain another twelve months. Lead with the order form, the discount, or 'so what would it take to get this done,' and you confirm every suspicion they have that you only show up when money is due. Lead with the ticket numbers, the dates, what actually broke internally on your side, what changed, and a named-owner plan for the next 90 days, and the same person will start negotiating with you instead of against you.
Read the playbook →Warm Call
A warm call is one where somebody else's credibility got you the answer. A peer downloaded your guide and said "you should call Dani", or a mutual contact fired off a three-line intro that the prospect skimmed on their phone and archived. They pick up expecting you, but expecting is not the same as knowing — they can usually name the referrer and almost never name what you sell. You start with maybe ninety seconds of borrowed goodwill and a very specific obligation: prove the referrer wasn't wasting their time. Warmth is a loan, not a grant. Two generic sentences — "So, just to give you a bit of background on us" — and you've converted a warm call into a cold call the prospect now feels mildly embarrassed to be on, which is worse than cold. The job is to cash the referral fast, convert it into one specific, testable reason you're relevant to *them* rather than to the referrer, and get out with a real second meeting.
Read the playbook →
Who you're calling
In Energy / Utilities, the people who pick up are distribution utility asset and reliability leaders. The titles you will actually reach:
- Head of Asset Management
- Network Planning Manager
- Manager Network Performance & Reliability
- GM Operations / Field Services
- Manager Regulatory Affairs
- Chief Engineer / Principal Distribution Engineer
- Vegetation Management Program Manager
What keeps them up at night
Name one of these in your first thirty seconds and you have earned the rest of the call.
An ageing distribution transformer fleet that fails in clusters, not one at a time
A large share of pole-mounted and pad-mount transformers are past 40 years and were installed in the same build-out waves, so they age together. Failures spike on the third or fourth day of a heatwave when overnight temperatures never drop and units get no thermal recovery — exactly when air-conditioning load is peaking and crews are already stretched. Asset managers know the fleet age curve but not which specific units are cooking, because condition data is limited to whatever a linesman noted on the last visual inspection. Replacement is largely run-to-failure with a small proactive program, and every failure is an unplanned outage, an emergency truck roll, and often a pole-top fire report.
Vegetation management spend grows every year and the regulator still asks why
Cycle-based trimming across thousands of line kilometres is one of the biggest controllable opex lines, and it climbs with contractor rates, wetter growing seasons and tighter clearance standards. Vegetation is still the top cause of unplanned outage minutes on rural feeders, so cutting the budget increases SAIDI and inviting scrutiny, while growing it draws questions about whether spend is risk-targeted or just cycle-driven. Program managers are under pressure to show which spans actually justified the truck and which were trimmed because the cycle said so.
Outage minutes are a regulated number with money attached to it
SAIDI and SAIFI aren't internal KPIs — they feed incentive schemes and regulatory reporting, and missing targets can cost millions in penalties on top of guaranteed service level payments to individual customers. Worst-served customers on long rural feeders generate complaints, ombudsman escalations and local-member letters. The Head of Network Performance has to explain every major event, defend which minutes were excluded, and show a credible plan to bring the trend down before the next reset.
Reliability improvement plans have to be justified years before the money is spent
Capex is locked into multi-year regulatory determination periods. If a program wasn't in the submission with a supporting business case, cost-benefit analysis and risk quantification, there's no allowance for it and no recovery. That means anything new arriving mid-period has to be funded from contingency, deferred maintenance or someone else's project — or it has to wait for the next reset, which may be three years out.
Storm season exposes how little they know in real time
During a major event, control room visibility comes from SCADA at the zone substation and from customer calls. Below the recloser, the picture is inferred. Crews get dispatched to patrol feeders to find the fault, restoration estimates slip, and the call centre gets hammered. Every event is followed by an internal review asking whether the failure was predictable and whether the response could have been faster.
Anything touching the operational network carries safety and cyber weight
Nothing goes on an energised asset without type approval, an isolation and permit-to-work path, and sign-off from the chief engineer. Anything touching the OT network needs security architecture review and network segregation assessment. Safety is the stated first value and it is genuinely the veto — a vendor who can't answer 'what happens if this device fails on a live pole' doesn't get to the second meeting.
What they'll push back with
The objections that come up on nearly every call, and a response that keeps the conversation alive.
- “Anything grid-adjacent needs two years of pilots and compliance review before it goes near an energised asset.”
- Agree with the process rather than arguing it, then shrink the first step. Ask what the actual gate sequence is — type approval, OT security review, chief engineer sign-off — and propose starting where none of those apply: a retrospective analysis on their own historical SCADA, outage and asset data, no hardware, no network connection. That gives the engineering team something to evaluate on their terms while the approvals run in parallel, and it tells you inside a few weeks whether the model finds anything on their fleet.
- “We plan capex in five-year regulatory cycles and this period is locked. There's no allowance for this.”
- Don't fight the cycle — position for it. Ask when the next submission is being drafted and who owns the reliability program business case, because that's the real timeline. Meanwhile, test whether it can be funded as opex or from an existing line: if it defers even a handful of transformer replacements or reduces truck rolls on unplanned faults, it may sit inside the maintenance budget rather than needing new capex. And build the evidence base now — a submission is far stronger with two years of the utility's own data behind it than with a vendor's brochure.
- “We already have a condition monitoring platform we bought three years ago that nobody uses.”
- Ask what specifically killed it — usually it's alerts nobody trusted, a separate login the control room never opened, or data that never got into the asset register. Then be explicit about which of those you avoid and how. If it can't surface in their existing ADMS/OMS workflow and drop into the works program the planners already run, it will die the same way. Offer to talk to the person who owns that failed system rather than around them.
- “Our asset data is a mess. Half the transformer records have the wrong install date and we don't have nameplate data for the rural fleet.”
- That's normal and it's often the reason to start, not to wait. Explain what the model actually needs versus what's nice to have — loading, temperature, fault history and switching records often carry more signal than a clean register. Then be honest about coverage: 'we can model the 60% of the fleet where we have usable data, and the exercise will tell you exactly which records to fix first.' Utilities respect a vendor who scopes down honestly more than one who claims the data doesn't matter.
- “How does this improve safety? If it doesn't, it's not a priority this year.”
- Make the safety line concrete instead of implied. Failures found before they happen are planned switching in daylight with a full permit-to-work, not a night callout to an energised fault with a crew working live near a burning pole-top. Fewer emergency responses means fewer kilometres driven under fatigue rules and fewer live-line jobs. Frame it in their language — reducing unplanned reactive work is a safety outcome the chief engineer can put in front of the board.
- “We've got engineers who've run this network for thirty years. They know which feeders are the problem.”
- Don't imply they don't. Their judgment is usually right about which feeders — the gap is which of the 4,000 units on those feeders goes first, and when. Offer to run the model blind and compare its ranked list against the engineers' list. If it just confirms what they already know, that's a cheap validation. If it flags units they weren't watching, that's the conversation. Let the engineers be the judges rather than the target.
- “Send me something and I'll take it to the asset committee.”
- Ask what the committee actually decides and what a paper needs to contain to survive it — cost-benefit, risk quantification, alignment to the reliability program. Then offer to build that with them rather than sending a PDF that gets forwarded once and dies. Get a date for the committee and a commitment to a fifteen-minute prep call beforehand, so you know what questions were asked even if you're not in the room.
Their language
Use these the way they do. Getting one wrong costs more credibility than getting none of them right.
Jargon
- SAIDI / SAIFI / CAIDI / MAIFI
- feeder, spur and feeder backbone
- zone substation and distribution substation
- regulatory determination / reset / capex allowance
- STPIS (service target performance incentive scheme)
- GSL payments and worst-served customers
- reclosers, ACRs and sectionalisers
- DGA (dissolved gas analysis) and tap changer
- N-1 contingency and load-at-risk
- ADMS / OMS / SCADA and the control room
- permit-to-work, isolation and access authority
- CBRM (condition-based risk management) and asset criticality ranking
Metrics they are measured on
SAIDI — total customer outage minutes per year, unplanned and normalised, SAIFI — interruptions per customer per year, STPIS incentive or penalty dollars at the end of the regulatory period, Unplanned distribution transformer failure rate per 1,000 units, Vegetation management spend per line kilometre, year on year, Number of worst-served customers and GSL payments made, Capex spend against regulatory allowance, TRIFR / LTIFR and count of live-line and emergency callout jobs
Related industries
Buyers with adjacent pressures, and the same call types against them.
Practise against a Energy / Utilities buyer
A live AI prospect with Energy / Utilities context — their pressures, their jargon, their objections. They talk back, they interrupt, and they can hang up on you. You get a scored breakdown when the call ends.
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