Cold calling is a live phone call to someone who has not asked to hear from you, made to earn a conversation rather than close a deal. It still works, but only if your buyer actually answers phones, you know why you are calling that specific person right now, and you can handle the first five seconds without sounding like every other rep. Everything that has gotten harder about cold calling, fewer direct lines, more gatekeepers, more automated systems, is a reason to call better, not a reason to stop.
TL;DR: Cold calling still works when the person you're calling actually uses a phone and you have a reason to be on their line that holds up for five seconds. What is dead is dialing lists of people you have not researched and hoping something magical comes out of your mouth. I have watched AI make the research part cheap, which means the only thing left to hide behind is gone.
What is cold calling, actually?
Cold calling is an unscheduled phone call to a prospect who has no existing relationship with you or your company. That is the whole definition. It is not a pitch, it is not a demo, and it is not a sales cycle. It is an attempt to earn a few minutes of someone's attention in real time.
The part that trips people up is the goal. I work with a lot of companies where the VP is telling the team to make more cold calls, and I am sitting there thinking through everything that has to go right for that to work. You have to have accurate contact information. You have to reach a human instead of an automated system. You have to get past a gatekeeper. Then you have to say something on the spot that makes a busy person choose to keep talking.
I can still justify cold calling, but not because I expect somebody to pick up and walk straight into a buying conversation. I justify it because a real voice on a real call is still the fastest way to find out whether there is anything there. No channel gives you that speed. That is the actual value, and it's worth the effort when the call is aimed at the right person.
Is cold calling still effective?
Yes, if it is done right. I got this question on a live session once, phrased pretty much the way everyone phrases it: in today's busy world, is cold calling really effective? My answer has not changed. It is effective when your audience is actually on the phone, and there are audiences that are not.
That is why the answer starts with your ICP and your personas, not with your dialer. Some roles live on their phone all day. Some executives do not even have office lines anymore, and the layers of gatekeepers around them keep getting thicker. If you have not figured out which of those you are dealing with, your connect rate is telling you something about your targeting, not about the phone.
The reps who say cold calling is dead are usually the ones who never got good at it. The channel did not fail them. They were calling the wrong people with nothing to say, and the phone was simply the fastest way to find that out.
Who should you be cold calling?
Before you touch the phone, you need to know who you're calling and why now. This is the part that gets skipped because it's unglamorous and nobody celebrates it in a sales meeting. Here is what I want settled before a single dial goes out.
- Your ICP: the company profile where you consistently win, not every company that could theoretically buy.
- Your personas: the specific titles inside that profile, and whether those people actually answer phones.
- A trigger event: something that happened at that account recently that makes this week a reasonable week to call.
- Contact data you trust: if the number is wrong, nothing else on this list matters.
- A reason that survives being said out loud: if you cannot explain in one sentence why you called this person and not the one next to them, you're not ready.
How do you open a cold call?
The first five seconds of a cold call decide the rest of it. Literally how you say hello dictates the conversation. I keep coming back to AIDA on this, attention, interest, desire, action, because the opening is pure attention and most reps treat it as a formality they have to get through before the real talking starts.
Gong did a study that identified the best way to start a cold call, and it is worth knowing. What matters more is that you have more than one way to open and you know which one works on which persona. That is the part reps never do.
Here is the exercise I give people. Go into ChatGPT and ask for five different ways of introducing a cold call with the goal of keeping the person on the phone. Then ask for five more, and five more. You are not looking for a script to read. You are building a library of openings you can test against real calls until you know what lands with a CIO versus what lands with an ops manager.
How do you test whether your cold calling is working?
Sales is a science, and cold calling is where that is easiest to prove. You have a controlled variable, a repeatable action, and a response rate you can count. Almost nobody runs the experiment.
The version I teach is simple. Write two different sales ready messages, two different value statements for the same persona. Make twenty phone calls with the first one and twenty with the second. Look at which one got the better response rate, then keep the winner and write a new challenger. You aren't guessing about what works anymore, you have data from your own calls in your own market.
Twenty calls is small enough that a rep will actually do it and big enough to see a difference. I would rather a team run that test once a month than add another hundred dials to the activity dashboard.
What does AI change about cold calling?
AI collapsed the time it takes to research an account and draft variations of what you are going to say. The excuse of not having time to prepare is gone. That sounds like good news for reps, and it is, but it cuts the other way too. When everyone has the same research in seconds, the research stops being the differentiator.
What is left is what happens on the call itself. The listening, the tone, the handling of a response you did not plan for, the judgment to go off script when the person says something more interesting than your question. AI doesn't replace great salespeople, it exposes the gap between average and great, and the phone is where that gap shows up the fastest.
I use AI as a force multiplier on the prep and the testing. Generate the openings, generate the value statement variations, pressure test my talk track. Then I pick up the phone myself, because the part that closes the gap is still human-led.
The JB Sales Approach
What I teach in Filling the Funnel is that cold calling is a skill built on fundamentals, in a specific order, and reps who skip the order never get good at it. The phone is not a separate discipline from the rest of prospecting, it's the channel where weak targeting and weak messaging get exposed in real time.
The order I work in with teams:
- Know your ICP and personas first, including whether that persona answers a phone at all. If the answer is no, the best cold call in the world will not save you.
- Build a sales ready message for each persona, a value statement specific enough that the person recognizes themselves in it.
- Write multiple openings and treat the first five seconds as its own skill, because how you say hello dictates the conversation.
- Run the twenty-and-twenty test, two messages, twenty calls each, keep the winner.
- Use AI to generate and test the variations, not to replace the call itself.
- Coach on recorded calls, because reps cannot hear their own openings the way a buyer hears them.
What to do this week
Pick one persona you call most often and write two different value statements for it. Make twenty calls with the first and twenty with the second, and write down the response rate for each. That is the whole assignment, and it will tell you more about your cold calling than any article will.
Before those forty calls, spend ten minutes in ChatGPT generating openings. Ask for five ways to introduce a cold call aimed at keeping the person on the phone, then ask for five more until you have a set worth testing. Pick the two you would actually say out loud and use those.
If you're a leader looking at the whole team rather than one rep, the question underneath this is bigger than cold calling. I help sales leaders decide whether to replace, rebuild, or retrain their sales team for the AI era, and the framework for that decision is at learn.jbarrows.com/pages/replace-or-rebuild. Filling the Funnel and Driving to Close are where we do the team training work, at learn.jbarrows.com/pages/team-training-packages, and if you want direct access to me, the individual packages are at learn.jbarrows.com/pages/individual-packages.
Frequently asked questions
Is cold calling dead?
No. It is harder than it used to be because fewer people have direct lines and gatekeepers are thicker, but it still works when you're calling a persona who uses a phone and you've a real reason to call. What is dead is dialing unresearched lists and hoping something lands.
How many cold calls should I make a day?
I'd rather you make fewer calls with a tested message than more calls with a message you have never measured. Start with the twenty-and-twenty test, two value statements at twenty calls each, and let the response rates tell you where to put your volume.
What should I say in the first five seconds of a cold call?
Something that earns attention rather than announcing a pitch, and you should have several versions of it. How you say hello dictates the conversation, so build a set of openings, test them by persona, and keep what actually keeps people on the line.
Can AI do cold calling for me?
AI can do the research, draft your openings, and help you test value statement variations faster than you ever could alone. The call itself is still the part where average and great separate, which is exactly why I would not hand it over.
Should I cold call or cold email?
That depends entirely on whether your persona answers a phone, which is an ICP question before it is a channel question. For the personas who do, the phone gives you something email never will, which is an answer in real time.