Sales prospecting skills: Identifying Leads and Building Rapport

This Business ESL worksheet focuses on sales prospecting, building rapport, and conducting effective discovery calls. It is most suitable for B2 level learners and is ideal for lessons on sales, customer relationships, communication skills. Students develop practical language for identifying qualified leads, understanding customer needs, handling objections, presenting solutions, and moving conversations toward the next step in the sales process. Other lessons you might like are: “A hunter or a farmer? Discover your sales persona!“, “Phrasal verbs: sales and selling“, “Customer satisfaction“, and “Phrasal verbs: customer service“

Speaking: Lead-in and Prospecting Messages

The lesson begins with a discussion about spam emails, sales calls, and outreach messages that students receive in their personal and professional lives. Learners analyze examples of LinkedIn messages, Instagram DMs, and cold emails, evaluating which approaches are effective and which are likely to be ignored. Students discuss what makes sales communication persuasive, how personalization affects engagement, and why some messages fail to build trust.

Speaking: Identifying Good Prospects

Students explore the fundamentals of sales prospecting and learn how to identify qualified leads. They evaluate different prospect profiles and decide whether each contact is a strong prospect or a poor fit based on factors such as research, business needs, budget, decision-making authority, and personalization. Learners discuss best practices for finding suitable prospects and compare the advantages and disadvantages of prospecting through LinkedIn, cold emails, and cold calls.

Vocabulary: The Sales Process

Students learn and practice key collocations related to the sales cycle, including set up a discovery call, build rapport, identify pain points, highlight the benefits, showcase the product, tailor the solution, address concerns, close the deal, and follow up with the customer. Controlled practice activities help learners understand the function of each expression before applying the language in realistic sales contexts.

Speaking: Discovery Calls and Customer Needs

Learners discuss how to start conversations with potential clients, build relationships, identify customer challenges, explain product benefits, adapt solutions to specific needs, handle objections, recognize buying signals, close deals, and maintain customer relationships through follow-up communication. These discussion activities encourage students to share professional experiences and develop confidence using practical sales language.

Listening: Building Rapport in Sales

Students watch the video “Building Rapport with Anyone in Sales” and summarize the speaker’s key ideas. The listening activities focus on creating trust, leading conversations, managing small talk effectively, and keeping discussions customer-centered. Learners answer comprehension questions, analyze the speaker’s advice, and discuss how communication styles and relationship-building differ across cultures.

Functional Language: Discovery Calls

Students study a range of useful expressions for each stage of a discovery call, including opening conversations, identifying pain points, exploring business impact, summarizing information, presenting solutions, addressing objections, suggesting next steps, and ending conversations professionally. Learners then practice replacing key phrases with alternative expressions that serve the same communicative function.

Speaking: Sales Role-Plays

The lesson concludes with practical role-play activities in which students take on the roles of salespeople and prospects. Scenarios include selling AI-powered recruitment software and freelance web design services, allowing learners to conduct discovery calls, ask questions, uncover needs, present solutions, respond to concerns, and suggest next steps. Students can also create their own sales scenarios based on products or services from their own industries, making the lesson highly personalized and directly relevant to real workplace communication.

For additional speaking practice, you can use the probtable conversation cards.