Should you cold call?

Cold calling covers two quite different practices and they should not be assessed together. One is calling a small number of organisations you have identified for a specific reason, with something relevant to say. The other is working a long list at volume in the hope of connection rates. The first is a legitimate business development method in some markets. The second has poor economics in most and carries costs that do not appear in the call metrics.

The narrow version works because the reason survives scrutiny. A supplier who noticed a specific opening — a facility that has expanded, a firm advertising for a role that implies a need, a business visibly using something you do better — has a reason to call that the recipient recognises as real. That is a small number of calls, prepared individually, and the connection rate bears no relation to volume dialling.

The volume version fails on arithmetic rather than on principle. Connection rates on unqualified lists are low, most connections are not the right person, and the small share of relevant conversations rarely covers the hours consumed. It also spends something that does not appear in any report: the recipients who now associate your name with an interruption. In a local market that cost is real, and it accrues to a business that will need those people to think well of it later.

The regulatory position decides the question before economics in consumer contexts. Calls to individuals are governed by do-not-call registries and consent rules, with penalties attached, and the obligations differ between calls, texts and automated dialling. That is not an argument against contacting consumers by other means; it is a reason to establish the rules for your jurisdiction and channel before building any activity that depends on them.

Where calling is right, what happens before it matters more than the call. A recipient who has encountered the business before — a useful piece of content, a referral, an event, a listing — is answering a semi-warm call, and the difference in reception is substantial. Businesses that treat calling as the first touch rather than as the second are choosing the hardest available version of it.

The honest comparison is against what the same hours would produce elsewhere. For most small service businesses, the same time spent on existing customers, on referral relationships, on being reachable when enquiries arrive, or on making the business findable produces more work than volume calling — and it compounds rather than resetting to zero each morning.