Dear SaaStr: In B2B Startups, How Useful is Cold Calling?
Look, I hate getting those calls. Especially the really pushy, dumb ones from SDRs that barely know their own products.
Do those work? I don’t know.
However … cold calling, done by folks who have done it well before, always works a bit.
Especially if you include “cold emailing” and “cold door knocking” into the definition of cold calling. And somehow, it seems to work especially well with very small businesses. If the pitch rocks.
You should always have an outbound sales team, at least, at some stage.
- The first question is what toolkit do they use? Cold calling doesn’t work for everyone.
- The second question is, if cold calling does work — can it work a lot? Can it really deliver 10% or more of your new bookings?
The reality is no matter how trained your team is here, some markets have higher “connect rates” than others.
Sales automation, marketing automation, business intelligence and analytics … segments with hundreds of vendors … typically have lower “connect rates” at least until you have a brand.
Verticals and segments with (x) relatively few vendors and (y) relatively high budgets, tend to have high connect rates. As high as 10% or more. Super-crowded spaces, with non-brands calling in … tend to have connect rates of well below 1%.
50 calls a day x 10% connect rate = a winning strategy
50 calls a day x 0.5% = ??? tough
In any event, my learning is back your VP of Sales here. If they’ve done cold calling before and achieved real results, let them run with it.
Listen to the calls. Make sure they aren’t cringe. But give them a chance to prove you wrong. I know we all hate getting these calls ourselves. But we aren’t always our buyers. Especially after the earlier days.
A related post here:
Outbound Always Works. If You Do It Right. And You Put In The Time.
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Jason Lemkin, Khareem Sudlow
