The Best Time to Make Cold Calls

What Is a Cold Call?

The cold call. 

Salespeople know that moment, just before they’re about to dial. 

Suddenly they feel the dread of imminent rejection. The anxiety of soliciting a customer who didn’t ask for it. A phone conversation that might end the very moment it begins.

This isn’t just the cold caller’s imagination. Every day, salespeople and their supervisors strive to make cold calls work. One rejection alone isn’t so brutal. But a hundred? Devastating.

But they don’t fret. Not if they have the right technology to give them an edge.

Cold Calls vs. Warm Calls

A salesperson calls a prospect — AFTER checking the National Do Not Call Registry, abiding by the rules and regulations of the salesperson’s industry and market, and honoring all of the prospect's rights detailed by the SEC, including calling them at home only between 8 am and 9 pm — that didn’t ask for it. That’s a COLD call.

Calling a referral a helpful client gave to the salesperson? That’s STILL a cold call, interrupting the referral’s day.

Is that such a bad thing to do? No! That referral’s in the market. The helpful client said so.

But when the salesperson calls a prospect after they fill out a lead form? Say from downloading a gated whitepaper from the company’s site? That’s a WARM call. And the right technology will KEEP those calls warm and make cold calls warmer by:

• giving salespeople the ability to make their calls look local and encourage pick-ups
• providing a dialer that prioritizes call lists, so salespeople reach the best prospects first
• deeply integrating with a CRM, so salespeople have engagement histories at their fingertips and can focus on selling

Cold Call Success Rates

According to Zippia.com, “Cold calling has a 2% success rate, on average.” So the cold caller who gets timing factors right gets cold calls right.

Time zones. Busy seasons. Holidays and events. Fiscal year. These variables should dictate whether a cold-calling campaign is kicked off at all.

With time zones, for instance, a cold caller might scroll west hourly to stay in an optimal hour for each call. Or they might choose to skip a month, like December, when NO ONE wants to take a cold call.

Or maybe they DON’T skip December! An ending fiscal year might spell opportunity — a leftover budget or a new one to spend. 

And with the right technology, the cold caller can rest assured that when they leave a voice message and the prospect texts back, the digital and voice channels will provide complete omnichannel visibility of the cross-channel interaction history.