The role-play assignment required you to make "cold calls". There's always a balance between preparing and just picking up the phone and dialing out. How much planning do you do before just picking up the phone and dialing? I bet if it is too little, it will sound like a cold call, and you'll get disconnected. Too much, and you waste time you could spend connecting with the people who you can convince to reserve a date and time to dine at the restaurant. What you need is a quick and easy way to do some pre-call planning, and develop a framework, therefore you will have a successful call without having to invest too much prep time. The key is to develop an outline of your strategy, a pre-call plan, a general framework to convince someone to dine at the restaurant. Develop a framework and present it for the class to analyze.