One of the more under appreciated sales techniques is cold calls. Yes, with marketing automation and inbound marketing there are great ways to tap into existing market demand, but often times in a startup there’s a mercenary aspect where market demand must be created. Enter cold calls.
As you would expect, cold calling is a numbers game. For our small but fast-growing market, our numbers look something like the following, assuming four weeks with 20 business days per month:
- A list of 333 companies that fit the ideal customer profile with three contacts at each company (1,000 contacts total found using LinkedIn and Jigsaw.com)
- 50 calls per day, 2,000 calls per month, every contact called twice per month
- 10 conversations per day
- 1 voicemail and send one email per contact per month
- 1 demo per day
This might seem daunting at first but it you assume 12.5 calls per hour, that’s four hours of calling a day. Add in one hour a day for the web demo and that still leaves three more hours for other work, follow-ups, planning, etc. My recommendation is to consider cold calling as part of your sales and marketing strategy.
What else? What are some other cold call ratios?
David Cummings on Startups 
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