Ugh… Cold Calling… Is It Even Worth Your Time?

“Cold calling is a numbers game…  
You just need to have enough hustle to make it work.”

Okay, my friends… 

Let’s talk about cold calling… and if it REALLY works.

Natsuyo Lipschutz, one of our premium subscribers, asked this...

I recently discovered this function on eSpeakers.com. It gives you a list of bureau and association contacts, and even gives you a sample cold call script. And there are a total of a couple of thousand contacts and their information. If I am to try cold calling, I’d be hiring an assistant to do that.

I’m wondering, how effective is cold calling like this?

Natsuyo, Thank you so much for writing in! We love it when our subscribers send us questions to tackle!

And this is a juicy one, for sure.

You’ll commonly hear sales gurus and cold calling lovers say something like...

“Cold calling is a numbers game.  If you just get more leads and do more calls, you’ll win more gigs.”

And honestly? I can’t dispute that.

It’s absolutely true. 

If you use cold calling, you’ll win some gigs.  

But will there be enough wins to make it worth your time?

Let’s break down the numbers to see if this is a numbers game you can actually win.

Start By Booking One Gig

These sales gurus and people who love cold calling essentially say you need enough hustle to make this work.  And if you’re not getting enough leads, it’s your problem.  It means you’re not working hard enough.

That feels a bit harsh to me.

So, let’s run the numbers using some basic assumptions and industry data averages to see if there’s any truth behind the claim.

To start, a 2% conversion rate from a cold call to a warm lead is an industry standard for B2B sales.  Let’s say you do 100 calls and get 2 warm leads.  Warm leads convert at about 14.6%, so for 2 warm leads, you’d get 0.292 bookings.

That means…

To book one gig, you’d need to make an average of 342 cold calls.