9 Cold Calling Tips for People Who Hate Cold Calling

The cold calling tips that help most when you hate the phone are the ones you follow before you dial. Call only businesses you have a reason to call, post a letter first, write down your first two sentences and stop after 10 dials. The nine tips below make each call shorter, more honest and easier to start.

Why do so many people hate cold calling?

Because most cold calls have no reason behind them. A cold call is a phone call to a business that has had no contact with you. When you also know nothing about that business, you interrupt a stranger with nothing to say, and dreading that is a sane response.

Most advice on b2b cold calling is written for sales teams with a dialer and a daily quota. It tells you to make more calls, stay positive and breathe.

An agency owner sits in a different seat. You make the calls yourself, between client work, to owners in your own town. You need a short list of good calls. A long list of dials would only feed the dread.

So change the call before you try to change yourself. A call with a reason is a different job from a call without one.

What are the 9 cold calling tips?

Nine tips, in the order you use them. The first three happen before you touch the phone.

1. Call only businesses you have a reason to call

Pick the list before you pick up the phone. A business with a slow, broken or dated website gives you something true to say. A business with a good website gives you nothing.

In our own email test, the choice of business moved replies more than the wording did. We scored 20,000 company websites and sent 3,570 emails. Businesses with the weakest 20% of sites replied positively about 3.2 times as often as a random sample of the rest. Naming the problem in the email added a smaller gain, and that gain was not statistically significant. The full test is in this post.

That test covered Dutch companies and email only. It says nothing about phone calls. Take it as a reason to choose your list with care, and as no more than that.

2. Post a letter first

A letter turns a cold call into a follow-up. "I posted you a letter last week about your website" is an opening you can say without flinching, because it is true and the owner can check it.

We have no call data to prove that a letter raises the number of meetings. The reasoning is plain. The owner has seen your name once, and your call now has a subject. Through Leadodo a posted letter in the US costs about 86 cents, for one page in black and white, sent First Class. That covers printing, postage and the envelope. We make the full case in why the letter goes first.

3. Write two sentences and stop

Script the opening and nothing else. Say your name, your agency and your town, then the reason. Here is one from a made-up agency to a made-up business, Lakeview Auto Repair at lakeviewauto.example.

Hi Maria, this is Dana Cole from Maple Street Web here in Tulsa. I posted you a letter last week about the Lakeview Auto Repair website, because the booking button is hidden when I open it on a phone.

Past that point you are in a conversation, and a script gets in the way. Our cold calling scripts give you seven openings to adapt.

4. Say why you are calling in the first breath

A reason beats an apology. Gong, a company that sells software for analyzing sales calls, studied 90,380 cold calls and found that stating the reason for the call raised the success rate 2.1 times (Gong).

In the same data, "Did I catch you at a bad time?" scored 0.9% against a baseline of 1.5%. The analysis dates from 2018. The page does not define success or say what kinds of businesses were called, so read it as a direction.

5. Dial 10 numbers in one sitting

Set a small number and a fixed slot. Ten dials at the same hour each working day is a habit you can keep. Fifty dials on a Friday afternoon is a punishment you will skip.

Ten is our suggestion, and no study stands behind it. The point is a session short enough that you start it.

6. Expect most dials to go unanswered

Silence is the normal result of a dial. In a Baylor University study, 50 real estate agents made 6,264 cold calls over two weeks in November 2011. 28% were answered, 55% were not answered and 17% were non-working numbers (Keller Center).

The study is old, and the agents rang random numbers in areas they had not marketed to before, so your answer rate will differ. The lesson holds. An unanswered call says nothing about you.

If your rate matched Baylor's, 10 dials would bring 2 or 3 conversations. That is 10 times 0.28, which comes to 2.8.

7. Ask for 15 minutes, never for the sale

The goal of the call is a short meeting. Ask for 15 minutes on a named day to show what you would change on the website.

A small ask is easy to grant and easy to refuse. Either way the call ends politely, and you have not sold anything to someone who was not ready.

8. Decide your three answers in advance

Owners give the same few replies. "Send me an email." "We already have someone." "Not interested." Write one calm sentence for each and keep it beside the phone.

Knowing your answer takes away the fear of being caught out. Our guide to sales objections has wording for the ones agencies hear.

9. Take the first clear no

When an owner says no, thank them and take the business off your list. You never have to argue, persuade or overcome anyone.

For many people who hate cold calling, that permission lifts the heaviest part. You are offering help, and the owner is free to turn it down.

How many cold calls should you make in a day?

As few as lets you make each one well. For an owner who also does client work, we suggest 10 dials a day in one sitting of about 45 minutes. Both numbers are our estimate.

The first row is the slow one. Leadodo's AI, Twip, scores every website in a search out of 100, and sites that score below 40 form the shortlist. That shortlist is a call list. See Lead Discovery.

Count conversations and meetings, and ignore the number of dials. Ten dials and three conversations is a good day, even with no meeting booked.

Which cold calling techniques should you skip?

Skip every technique that depends on a trick. If you would be embarrassed to explain it to the owner afterward, leave it out.

• Fake familiarity. Pretending to know the owner, or to be returning a call, wins ten seconds and loses the conversation.
• Volume for its own sake. A dialer that rings 100 numbers gives you 100 calls with no reason behind any of them.
• The full audit. Reading out nine faults sounds like criticism from a stranger. One finding is enough.
• The rebuttal. A comeback to a clear no turns a short call into a bad memory for both of you.

When is a call the wrong tool?

When you have no finding, when the owner has already replied, or when the owner has said no. In each case a call adds nothing.

A call is one step among several. Your Outbound Machine runs six steps over 19 working days. A posted letter arrives on day 1, emails follow on days 4, 7 and 11, and LinkedIn steps come on days 15 and 19. None of those needs you to dial. Leadodo has cold calling as a tool of its own. If your letters and emails already bring replies, you can leave the call out.

Whether calls still earn their place at all is a fair question. We look at the evidence in is cold calling dead.

Questions

How do you get over the fear of cold calling?

Make the call smaller. Call only businesses where you have one true thing to say, script the first two sentences and stop after 10 dials. The fear shrinks when the call has a reason and an end.

What is the best time to cold call a local business?

We found no measured answer for local businesses that we could read at its source. A sensible start is to avoid each trade's rush, such as lunch for a restaurant. Note the hour of every call that gets answered. After two weeks your own log will tell you.

Should you call or email first?

Post a letter first, then email, then call. The letter gives both the email and the call something to refer to. Our email test showed that who you contact matters more than the wording, and it did not test calls.

Do you need a script for cold calling?

You need two sentences. Write your name, agency and town, then the reason for the call. A longer script makes you sound like you are reading one.

Is it legal to cold call a business in the US?

The FTC states that most phone calls to a business, made to solicit sales from that business, are exempt from the Do Not Call provisions of the Telemarketing Sales Rule (FTC). That page covers one federal rule. Your state may add its own, so check before you call. This is not legal advice.

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Next step. Give your calls a reason before you dial. Your Outbound Machine posts the letter and sends the emails, so the call you make is a follow-up. See the sequence.