One day of cold call : how much cash collected?
A day of cold call costs around 35 USD, and can potentially bring a 1000x ROI
7/14/20262 min read
Cold Calling: How Much Does It Cost?
If you do cold calling yourself, you obviously don't have to pay anyone a salary.
The only things you'll need to pay for are:
Data: €25 for 75 contacts with phone numbers.
Prospecting lists: €2 per working day with Apollo (a much better tool than LinkedIn).
Parallel dialer: €4–10 per working day, depending on which tool you use.
So you're looking at roughly €30–40 max for a full day of prospecting.
You can find the different tools you should be using for prospecting here.
It's important to constantly refresh your prospecting lists to get the best possible meeting-booking results.
Otherwise, you'll keep calling the same people who never answer and who may be among the least receptive to prospecting in the first place.
So, on one side, we have €30–40 in costs. And on the other?
1 to 4 actual meetings with your target audience.
Assuming a 15% conversion rate from meetings to closed deals (the average B2B closing rate), your customer acquisition cost would be:
€233 in the worst-case scenario (1 meeting per day).
€117 if you book 2 meetings per day.
In theory, if you're targeting independent professionals, very small businesses, or even smaller SMEs, you can often book even more meetings per day than that, provided you know how to prospect.
But even with deliberately conservative assumptions, cold calling is bound to be profitable.
And once you've mastered prospecting, you can hire junior salespeople, teach them to do exactly what you do, and scale your customer acquisition or delegate the work entirely.
To improve your closing rate, you can also implement these tips:
Set the agenda at the beginning of the meeting: "The idea behind this call is to see whether there might be an opportunity for us to work together."
Ask discovery questions and dig deeper. Focus on preparing the ground for a potential collaboration rather than simply presenting your offer.
Schedule a second meeting before ending the first one. This helps keep the opportunity moving forward.
If you're a freelancer, mastering cold calling can help you find your own clients and projects.
If you're a salesperson, it can help you absolutely crush your targets, maximise your commission (or land better jobs at better companies).
If you're the founder of an agency, a startup, or any other B2B service business, it can take your business to the next level. Send me an email at louis@outbound-machine.com if you are interested.