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Cold calling is a great way to get high-value meetings. It’s definitely not for everyone though. Traditional and old school methods don’t apply as the number of cold calls going out in the market are a lot, salespeople have to try their best to differentiate.

Another factor that really helps cold callers succeed is having up-to-date information on their prospects and access to Direct dials!

My sources of knowledge on outbound include:

LinkedIn posts from sales leaders - This is the primary method, there’s a lot of fluff out there. I’d advise listening or following to some real salespeople like:

Ryan Reisert: CEO fo the Sales Developers - I’ll share content about him in this question because I really like the stats he shares.

Tito Bohrt: CEO of AltiSales

Jim Keenan: A real sales Guru, recently wrote the book GAP selling *A must read*

Josh Braun: Another guru in sales who knows how to capture the recipients' attention.

However, cold call stats revolve around a few things:

1. Connection rate; This is the rate or % of people you manage to connect with. Things that hamper this % are invalid dials or numbers, not being able to get past the gatekeeper, voicemail, no answer, etc.
2. Conversation rate; Out of the connection rate, how many were you able to have a proper conversation with.
3. Meeting Rate; Out of the X number of conversations how many agreed to a meeting.
4. Time; Often at times people don’t factor in time which is extremely important. Your meeting rate could be 25% from cold calls but if it takes a lot of time then that can really impact the effectiveness of our activities.

Usually, the cold calling process or objective ends here. After this point, there are certainly other stages like qualification rate, Opportunities generated, Contract sent, Closed won/ Closed lost, etc.

Ryan Reisert works with The Sales Developers, he often posts his cold calling stats, which I really like. The full post is here.

However, to break it to you, the percentage and stats Look something like the below:

1. Dials - 447,703 dials
2. Conversations & Rate - 14,297 dials or 3.2%
3. Meetings & Rate - 1022 meetings scheduled or 7.1% conversation to meeting rate
4. Time - April 17th, 2018 - Sep 27th, 2019 which is approximately 5 months and 10 days or 120 working days and about 900+ hours of work.

Holistically if we look out of 447,703 dials we get about a 0.22% meeting rate. However, you need to keep in mind that these are meetings with your next best potential customers. And certainly, they are “high-value meetings”. What’s more, is one can even email or reach out on LinkedIn to those who they couldn’t connect with, this would generate even more meetings. No need to restrict yourself to pure cold calling.

Data helps with this regard but what would help even more is knowing how many closed/won we got and what is the ACV or average contract value. Let’s assume if you even have an ACV of $30,000 and a Meeting to close rate of 10% then you’re looking at about 102 new customers and $3million+ in revenue! This is not even factoring CLV or customer lifetime value.

Hope this helps you understand how percentages work with successful cold calling practices.

Do note: I’m the VP of Marketing at Cloudlead, a custom B2B data company and I am affiliated with this nature of the question. However, I have no affiliation with any other names above like The Sales Developers, AltiSales, etc.

Disclaimer:

Disclaimer: I’m the Co-founder of Cloudlead, a B2B data & Lead generation company. My answer may be biased but not without proper justification!