Cold calling for my startup and how I learned to embrace the challenge

I hate <i>getting</i> cold calls. So I avoid doing it to other people.<p>Yes that makes me less of a salesman. So be it.<p>Tangent: In India you can report unsolicited sales calls to a central (government) authority, where you can sign up to get on a &quot;Do Not Disturb&quot; list, and get any sales caller who ignores this fined, and eventually get his number disconnected etc.<p>The system isn&#x27;t perfect, and there are some impressive hacks to bypass it, but the situation now is <i>much</i> better than before these regulations existed. Where one used to get multiple spammers a day, now weeks and months can go by before getting one (who I promptly report). My number must be on some shared &quot;cranky idiot who hates cold callers&quot; list, I almost never get these calls now.<p>A minister was interrupted in parliament while presenting the annual national budget (iirc) by someone who wanted to sell him a credit card(!), which led to this regulation.<p>And it is a godsend. Cold callers should all burn in hellfire (imo)

If you cold-call me, I will spend the first few minutes feeding you false information. I will deliberately drag out the process, and at about 12min into the call, I will confess that I&#x27;ve been faking everything. At this point, I will attempt to tilt you so that you lose your temper and start cursing at me. On a really good day, you&#x27;ll be so angry that your manager will have to come onto the call. I will feed them a few minutes of fake information, then attempt to tilt them as well. On the best days, you and your manager will sit around a reverse phone book and dox me, looking to find ways to intimidate or control me while I laugh and attempt to keep you on the line. My record is 52min, lasting over multiple phone calls, ending in a dramatic reading of a maths paper over the phone to a speakerphone consisting of three levels of management.<p>I want your business to fail if you cold-call.

One useful tip I got from a friend in sales: open the call with an offer to set up a call at a more convenient time. It seems strange to immediately ask for another call, but it is really helpful in showing that you&#x27;re friendly&#x2F;flexible, and you recognize that the person you&#x27;re calling is busy.<p>About 30% of the time, the person was happy to chat in the moment (they had chosen to answer a call from an unknown number, after all). And the rest of the time, you benefit from setting up a time that is more convenient for them. Some of the time you end up never having the later call—but it seems this happens where there wasn&#x27;t a great fit to begin with, so it actually saves you time talking to an unlikely lead.

Cold calls like will likely get forwarded to our internal extension that relays to &quot;Lenny&quot;. The longest we&#x27;ve had someone on the line talking to the bot is currently at 8:37 on the leaderboard. :D

Cold calling is wildly effective. It just takes making more than 2 calls a week. I tell my team &quot;get 100 on the phone without selling something and I&#x27;ll give you $100&quot; been doing that for years and have never paid a rep the $100.

Cold calling is not for me. I hate even answering email or inbound communication.<p>One thing I&#x27;ve realized working on my own is that you can do anything you want. You don&#x27;t have to do the thing you hate the most to make progress. It will feel draining, feel like more work, and be less productive than focusing on where you are strong.

Cold calling me is a guaranteed way to prevent yourself from ever getting my business, and I know I&#x27;m not alone in that. My subconscious automatically tags companies that cold call as scams.

Cold calling is an extremely effective strategy for us. Most important lesson I learned building our SDR program is that nobody natively likes cold calling so to do it well, it needs to be their only job.<p>When I had account managers that had to do their own cold calling they greatly underperformed. When I had someone whose only job was to cold call and book demos which were then closed by account managers one person was getting more meetings than all my account managers combined.<p>Some people don’t like getting cold calls, I personally don’t mind and the number of people that don’t mind statistically out number the ones who do. We have tons of data to support this. I highly recommend evaluating this as a strategy in any B2B customer acquisition program.

Cold calling can be extremely effective if you can make yourself do it. Some years ago I did that for a few weeks to promote a piece of software I wrote and I made a ton of interesting connections. Not just for my product but there are a lot of small business owners who are very willing to discuss business in general and you can gain a lot of business ideas that way. It can be very exhausting though if you don&#x27;t enjoy talking a lot or take rejection personally.

Are there any good resources on who to call and where to get phone numbers? Obviously it should be potential customers, but should it be the CTO of the company if it is tech product for example? And how do you get their phone number?