The sales profession periodically declares cold calling dead.

When I first wrote about this subject in 2017, social selling was the fashionable alternative. Salespeople were encouraged to establish a professional presence on LinkedIn, publish useful content, engage with potential customers and develop relationships before making a direct approach.

Those activities have not disappeared. LinkedIn still measures them through its Social Selling Index, which covers professional branding, prospect identification, engagement and relationship-building. But the term social selling has largely lost its status as a revolutionary sales methodology. It has become one element of normal B2B prospecting.

Today, the fashionable terms are signal-based selling, intent data, multichannel outreach, revenue intelligence and AI-assisted prospecting. The terminology has changed, but the fundamental question remains:

When does it make economic sense to approach someone who has had no previous contact with you?

What is a cold call?

Cold calling is the unsolicited approach to a potential customer who has had no prior direct contact with the salesperson.

The word calling can be misleading. The approach may be made by telephone, email, LinkedIn message, video, letter or personal visit. What makes the contact cold is not the channel. It is the absence of an existing relationship or an explicit invitation to start a conversation.

A message sent through LinkedIn is therefore not necessarily warm merely because it is delivered through a social network. An automated connection request followed immediately by a generic sales pitch is simply a cold call in digital form.

Conversely, a telephone call can be highly relevant and carefully prepared, even though the recipient has never spoken with the salesperson before.

Why people dislike cold calling

There are two obvious reasons why cold calling has such a poor reputation.

First, most people dislike approaching strangers. Making an unsolicited call exposes the salesperson to immediate rejection. For many people, it ranks alongside public speaking as an activity they would prefer to avoid.

Second, most of us have received poorly targeted approaches from salespeople offering something irrelevant in an intrusive and unpleasant way.

The technology has changed, but the experience has not. Today, the same irritation may arrive as:

• a generic email claiming to have studied your company;
• a LinkedIn connection request followed seconds later by a sales pitch;
• an AI-generated message containing superficial personalisation;
• or a telephone call from someone who has done no preparation.

People do not necessarily object to unsolicited contact. They object to irrelevant, poorly timed and self-centred contact.

Cold calling has not disappeared

Despite repeated predictions of its demise, outbound prospecting remains an important part of many sales processes.

Salesforce recently reported that salespeople still spend close to a full working day each week on prospecting. Almost half said they lacked sufficient capacity to conduct adequate cold outreach. The current discussion is therefore not about eliminating outbound contact. It is about using data, automation and AI to make it more focused and productive.

Cold calling survives because many companies cannot generate enough opportunities by waiting for potential customers to discover them.

Content, search engine optimisation, social media activity, webinars, newsletters, and customer referrals may drive inbound demand. However, these activities do not always produce enough qualified opportunities, especially when:

• the company is new or unknown;
• the product represents a new category;
• the target market is narrow;
• the potential customer is not actively searching;
• the problem has not yet become urgent;
• or the company needs to grow faster than inbound demand permits.

Under such circumstances, someone must take the initiative.

Cold calling can be both pleasant and effective

Two simple examples illustrate the point.

Doormat subscriptions

Some years ago, while waiting at my physiotherapist’s clinic, I saw two well-dressed people enter and ask who was responsible for managing the premises.

They were selling doormat subscriptions.

The service included customised mats carrying the customer’s logo. The mats were cleaned and replaced at regular intervals.

The salespeople approached businesses without an appointment. However, their activity was not random. As soon as they entered a shop, clinic or office building, they could see whether the organisation had an obvious need for the service.

They rarely closed a subscription during the first visit. The purpose of the initial approach was to identify an opportunity, start a conversation and build a pipeline. Subsequent nurturing could take place through additional visits, telephone calls and emails.

A supervisor later explained the business model to me:

• Salespeople worked as independent agents on commission and had exclusive responsibility for a geographical district.
• They organised their own time but received coaching and supervision.
• Building a viable customer base in a district took between three and six months.
• Only a small proportion of new recruits possessed the patience, perseverance and organisational discipline required.
• The work involved much more research, planning and administration than an observer might assume.
• Successful salespeople could earn around $10,000 a month.
• Unsolicited personal visits were the most effective way to start the process.

It was cold calling, but the offer was visible, relevant and easy to understand. The salesperson could quickly assess whether there was a potential fit, while the customer could immediately understand the service.

Selling books to bookstores

When my first Danish business biography was published, not every bookstore automatically ordered it from the distributor.

I therefore called or visited bookstores in my area to ask whether they had the book in stock. When they did not, I offered them an attractive commercial arrangement.

The conversations took less than ten minutes, and my initial success rate was 100 per cent.

Again, the calls were unsolicited, but they were not random. I contacted businesses for which the product was directly relevant. The person receiving the approach could understand the proposition immediately and make a decision without a lengthy internal process.

Cold does not mean blind

One of the persistent misconceptions about cold calling is that it requires salespeople to work through an indiscriminate list of names.

It does not.

A company can define its ideal customer profile, segment the market and identify organisations that are likely to experience the problem it solves. Salespeople can research each account, identify the relevant stakeholders and look for evidence that the timing may be appropriate.

Signals may include:

• a change in management;
• a funding round;
• international expansion;
• rapid recruitment;
• the introduction of a new product;
• regulatory changes;
• the use of a competing technology;
• engagement with relevant content;
• visits to particular website pages;
• or another event likely to create a need for change.

AI can accelerate much of this work. It can help compile account information, identify patterns, prioritise leads and prepare a relevant opening. It can also automate routine follow-up and ensure that promising accounts do not fall through the cracks in the sales process.

However, AI does not make an irrelevant proposition relevant. It merely enables companies to produce irrelevant messages more quickly when the underlying segmentation and sales logic are poor.

Is a signal enough to warm the call?

The distinction between cold and warm has become less useful than it once was.

A person may have visited your website without knowing your company. They may have liked a post without experiencing the problem your product solves. They may belong to a target account without having any influence over a purchase.

Conversely, someone who has never interacted with your company may be experiencing an urgent problem that your solution can address.

The important questions are therefore not whether the contact is technically cold or warm. They are:

• Is the person likely to experience the problem?
• Is the problem important enough to justify action?
• Are we approaching the right stakeholder?
• Do we have a credible reason for making contact now?
• Can we explain the relevance quickly?
• Is the expected return greater than the cost of the approach?

Research must be proportional to the opportunity

Nothing prevents a salesperson from spending an hour, a day or several weeks researching an account before making first contact.

But research also has a cost.

Spending an hour preparing for a call may be sensible when the potential contract is worth hundreds of thousands of euros. It makes no sense when the expected gross profit from a new customer is €100.

The appropriate level of preparation depends on factors such as:

• potential customer lifetime value;
• gross margin;
• probability of establishing contact;
• expected conversion rate;
• length of the sales cycle;
• cost of sales resources;
• and the opportunity cost of the salesperson’s time.

That is why cold calling cannot be judged in isolation. It must be assessed as one step in the complete revenue-generation process.

Social selling became part of the process

In 2017, social selling was sometimes presented as an alternative to cold calling. In retrospect, that was a false distinction.

Publishing useful material, developing a professional reputation, following potential customers, responding to their posts and building a network can all make subsequent outreach more effective.

But these activities do not necessarily remove the need to ask for a conversation.

Social platforms have also become crowded. Generic LinkedIn messages now create much the same irritation as poorly executed telephone calls. A salesperson may spend months liking a prospect’s posts without ever creating a commercial opportunity.

Social activity is valuable when it helps the salesperson:

• understand the potential customer;
• identify the right person;
• recognise an appropriate moment;
• establish credibility;
• or start a relevant conversation.

It is less valuable when it becomes a substitute for asking the customer to take the next step.

Multichannel prospecting is now normal

The modern sales process does not force a choice between cold calling, email and social media.

A salesperson might:

1. identify an account from a market signal;
2. research the company using public information and AI tools;
3. follow relevant people on LinkedIn;
4. engage with a useful post;
5. send a concise email;
6. make a telephone call;
7. leave a voicemail;
8. share material relevant to the customer’s situation;
9. and follow up when a new signal appears.

None of these channels is universally superior. Their effectiveness depends on the buyer, the market and the circumstances.

Senior executives may ignore unsolicited emails but answer a well-timed telephone call. Other prospects may never answer an unknown number but will respond to a concise LinkedIn message. Some markets still respond well to personal visits. Others require introductions through trusted relationships.

The objective is not to defend a preferred channel. It is to design the sequence most likely to produce a productive conversation at an acceptable cost.

It all comes down to return on investment

The question “Is cold calling dead?” is not particularly helpful.

A better question is:

Under which circumstances does unsolicited outbound contact contribute to an efficient and scalable revenue-generation process?

The answer depends on:

• the size and accessibility of the target market;
• the urgency of the customer’s problem;
• the complexity of the offer;
• the ability to identify suitable prospects;
• the ease of reaching decision-makers;
• the value of each customer;
• the conversion rates at each stage;
• and the cost of the people and technology involved.

For some companies, high-volume telephone prospecting will be uneconomic and damaging to the brand. For others, carefully targeted calls will remain the fastest and most reliable way to build a pipeline.

The same applies to email, LinkedIn, events, content marketing and every other method of reaching potential customers.

Cold calling is not dead. Social selling has not disappeared either. Both have become components of a broader, data-informed and increasingly AI-assisted sales process.

The winners will not be the companies that follow the latest sales fashion. They will be those who understand their customers, measure the economics of each activity, and combine available channels to produce sustainable revenue.