Is B2B Cold Calling the Best Customer Acquisition Channel?
With cold calls, you can reach about 50% of your addressable market with a huge transformation potential
8/3/20262 min read
Cold calling is the most effective acquisition channel in B2B: for a given number of contacts, cold calling will generally generate the most meetings.
Out of 100 contacts with a phone number, cold calling will often generate anywhere from 2 to 20 meetings.
However, that doesn't necessarily mean it's always the most efficient channel.
In large markets, typically mass-market environments with tens of thousands of potential target companies, cold email will actually be the most efficient channel.
Why? Once your email sequence is launched, there's very little left to do. A well-crafted sequence can generate approximately one meeting for every 100 contacts.
So, in a market of 30,000 companies, you could potentially generate 300 meetings every seven months (assuming you only contact each company once every seven months to minimize the negative impact of repeated outreach).
Do you really need more than 200 meetings every seven months? That's approximately 29 meetings per month.
In reality, a well-crafted cold email strategy is more than sufficient for the vast majority of businesses.
And with cold email, there's no need to hire a Head of Sales earning €100k+ per year.
Cold calling only becomes truly interesting — or even necessary — when you have fewer than 10,000 companies to target in your market. In other words, when you're operating in a high-ticket market.
Furthermore, cold calling will only allow you to reach a maximum of around 50% of your addressable market:
You won't be able to find phone numbers for 10–30% of your prospects.
Among those whose numbers you do find, 10–20% will have incorrect or unusable numbers.
Another 10–20% will never answer their phones.
Finally, 10–30% of the people who do answer won't even want to speak to you because you're a salesperson.
But for the prospects who remain, there's no denying it: cold calling is extremely effective.
In fact, if you cold-call 30,000 companies every seven months, you could probably generate at least 600 meetings, and potentially as many as 3,000.
However, this requires a substantial amount of human working time and a fairly large team of cold callers.
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Petite correction mathématique : j'ai corrigé « 200 RDVs tous les 7 mois = 42 par mois » en environ 29 par mois. Pour arriver à 42, il faudrait 300 RDVs sur 7 mois.