Top Cold Calling Tips
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
Cold calling works. But most salespeople are doing it wrong.
When done well, cold calls create conversations that cold email and LinkedIn messages never could. When done poorly, it leads to the belief that ‘cold calling is dead’.
These 10 tips will change how you think about cold calling, not just how you execute it. What you believe a cold call is for determines everything about how you show up on one.
1. Lower the Bar: You’re Not Closing
The biggest mistake salespeople make on cold calls is thinking they have to get the prospect to say “yes” to their product.
That bar is too high. And it’s the wrong bar.
You’re not closing on a cold call. You want your prospect to say “yes” to learning more about your product, not “yes” to buying. Salespeople who try to win the deal in four minutes on the phone end up pitching, pushing, and trying to overcome every objection. Prospects feel that energy and they want out.
Cold calls aren’t meant to close. They’re meant to open.
2. Cultivating Curiosity Is the Goal
The goal of a cold call is to make the prospect curious. That’s it.
You just have to make them think: maybe there’s something here worth 30 minutes of my time. Not “this is the solution to my problem.” Not “I need to buy this.” Just enough interest to want another conversation.
That’s a much smaller ask than closing and it’s the actual way to book meetings. Curiosity is what makes a prospect agree to give you their time. Pitches don’t do it. Persuasion doesn’t do it. Curiosity does.
When you anchor on curiosity instead of the meeting, the call relaxes. You’re not trying to convince anyone of anything. You’re having a conversation with the goal of making it interesting enough that they want another one.
Prospects can tell the difference between a salesperson who needs the meeting and a salesperson who’s genuinely curious about whether there’s a fit. The first one feels like work to talk to. The second one feels like a conversation.
The next time you pick up the phone, don’t ask yourself how to book the meeting. Ask yourself how to make this person curious. If you can cultivate curiosity, booking the meeting becomes the natural outcome.
3. Open with Presence
The best cold callers I’ve seen show up to every call like they’re greeting someone they know. When you do this, there’s no awkwardness, hesitation, or formality in the opening.
The key here is that you have to go first. Prospects don’t eagerly answer cold calls. They almost always start out guarded, skeptical, and wondering how they can get off the call. If you wait for them to set the tone, the tone is going to be closed off and defensive. It’s very difficult to cultivate curiosity when someone is in that state. Instead, you need to set the tone by sounding like someone they want to engage with and open up to.
This is frame control in action. Every interaction is a collision of frames and the stronger frame wins. On a cold call, your frame will almost always be colliding with a prospect who’s guarded by default. And if you show up with presence, your frame holds and the prospect gets pulled into it instead.
This is where your presence and energy becomes disarming. A guarded prospect is expecting your rehearsed scripted pitch. When you show up with genuine presence, enthusiasm, and ease, none of that arrives. The prospect’s defences are aimed at something that isn’t there. Their guard drops and the call shifts.
Presence is the energy of someone who isn’t worried about being on the call. Your voice is steady, your pace is unhurried, and you’re not rushing to get your pitch in before they hang up. You sound like you’d be fine if the call ended in 30 seconds and that’s exactly why it won’t.
The mindset is simple: you’re calling to offer help. You potentially have a solution to their problems. Show up that way.
4. Keep Your Opener Simple
The most effective cold call openers are short. Two sentences, then a question.
State who you are. Give them a single, prospect-focused reason for the call. Then ask a question about them.
A common mistake most salespeople make is opening with their elevator pitch. Don’t.
You’re starting a conversation, not delivering a pitch.
Here’s how I open:
“Hi Sarah, it’s Thomas calling from X. I work with a lot of marketing leaders and wanted to reach out because I saw you’re running content at scale. How are you currently handling remote recordings?”
That’s it. I’ve stated who I am, given a one-line reason for the call that’s about them, and asked a question that invites them into a conversation.
I almost immediately hand the mic over to my prospect. My presence is what makes them take it, and they’re talking before they’ve had time to decide whether they want to be.
Get to the question fast. That’s where the conversation begins. Once you start learning about them, you can figure out the best way to cultivate curiosity.
5. Don’t Ask for Permission
“Do you have a minute?” “Is this a bad time?” “Can I have 30 seconds of your day?”
Stop opening cold calls like this.
Permission-based openers are everywhere in sales training. They get taught as a way to be respectful of the prospect’s time, lower their defensiveness, give the prospect a sense of control, establish a ‘peer-to-peer’ conversation, and avoid a pushy pitch.
The logic sounds reasonable. It’s also wrong.
These openers undermine the cold call before it starts.
You’re handing the prospect an easy out and most of them will take it. “Actually, it is a bad time” is the path of least resistance for someone who wasn’t expecting your call.
You’re also immediately telling the prospect that you’re not sure you should be calling them. That sets the tone for everything that follows. If you don’t think the call is worth their time, why should they?
And hilariously, the sales trainers who preach this method almost always script the salesperson giving an elevator pitch after they’re given permission by the prospect.
The fix isn’t to be pushy. It’s to skip the permission question entirely and get to the actual reason for the call. Look back at the opener in #4, I didn’t ask if it was a good time. I just started the conversation. If it’s genuinely a bad time, the prospect will tell me.
Presence and curiosity are how you lower defensiveness. Not pitching is how you avoid a pushy pitch.
6. Sell on Emotion
People don’t buy with logic. They buy with emotion and then justify it later with logic.
There are two modes your prospect can be in on a cold call:
- Thinking state: logical, analytical, evaluating risk.
- Feeling state: emotional, intuitive, action-oriented.
Quick decisions get made in feeling states. Objections, requests for more information, and rumination come from thinking states. Your job on a cold call is to keep prospects in a feeling state.
The fastest way to push someone into a thinking state is to overload them with information. When you give an overview of features, compare yourself to competitors, or justify your pricing you turn the conversation into an analytical exercise.
Keep it simple. Ask questions about their situation. Lean into emotion, not features and benefits. And you’ll find that this will outperform a long, detailed pitch every time.
Most salespeople solely focus on pain. That’s a mistake. Yes, pain is an emotion. But there are lots of emotions, like excitement. You want to connect with whatever emotion makes a meeting feel worth the prospect’s time and oftentimes that isn’t pain.
I sell on excitement more than anything else. It’s not a tactic, it’s just how I naturally show up. When I’m genuinely excited about what I’m selling and what it could do for someone, that energy is contagious. Prospects lean in. They get curious. They start to imagine what’s possible.
Pain absolutely matters, and there are times when digging for pain is the right move. But on a cold call, people aren’t going to share their deepest, vulnerable emotions with a stranger in the first four minutes. Excitement and curiosity are often more accessible and just as effective at moving the conversation forward.
Find the emotion that fits your product and the prospect you’re talking to.
For more, see: Emotional Selling: Thinking vs Feeling States
7. Actually Respond to What Your Prospect Says
The best cold callers are genuinely curious about the person on the other end of the line. They’re not there to pitch, they’re there to have actual conversations. And in a real conversation, you respond to what the other person actually says.
It sounds obvious. But it’s harder than it sounds.
Too often in cold calls salespeople ‘stick to the script’ and run their next scripted line regardless of what the prospect has actually said. They’re ignoring the prospect’s engagement.
I was recently coaching a BDR and heard this on their cold call:
- BDR: “It’s BDR calling from ACME Co.”
- Prospect immediately engages: “ACME Co? That sounds familiar.”
- BDR continuing with their script: “Have you heard of us before?”
- Prospect reluctantly: “Actually, no”
The prospect’s tone immediately shifted from positive curiosity to defensiveness. These sorts of scripted exchanges create friction.
Every time a prospect says something, they’re handing you a piece of information. Good cold callers pick it up and use it.
The best way to do this is by using the ARQ method. An ARQ response would be:
- BDR: “It’s BDR calling from ACME Co.”
- Prospect: “ACME Co? That sounds familiar.”
- BDR: “That’s great that it rings a bell. Would a quick refresher be helpful?”
- Prospect: “Yeah, that’d be great.”
When you’re actually listening, you’ll hear that the prospect is telling you exactly how to make them curious.
8. Find One Reason, Not Three
On a cold call, you’re looking for one reason. Not three. One.
Discovery on a cold call has one job: find the one thing that makes a meeting worth the prospect’s time. You don’t need to do a ton of digging for pain. You don’t need a complete picture of their tech stack and vendor relationships. You just need one thing. The moment you have it, book the meeting.
I hear a lot of cold calls where salespeople are doing too much digging for pain and asking too many questions. When you find the thing that resonates, stop. Stacking more reasons on top of it actually weakens the close. It’s the classic “talking yourself out of the sale.”
If you’re selling water in the desert and a very tired-looking man approaches you, all you need to ask is “are you thirsty?” After they say “yes”, you sell them the water. It’s simple. You wouldn’t follow it up with, “and do you also enjoy the taste of water? Are you concerned about long-term dehydration?” That’d be absurd. They’re thirsty and you sell water. Sell them the water.
When someone is open, book the meeting. Say, “Sounds like we can help. Let’s get some time on the calendar.”
9. Get to a Yes or a No
Every cold call should end with a clear answer.
A yes is great. The meeting is booked and the deal moves forward. A no is also valuable. It frees up your time, tells you something about your targeting, and closes a loop.
What costs you the most is the ambiguous maybe. These look like:
- “Send me some information.”
- “Try me next quarter.”
- “Let me think about it.”
These answers feel like progress, but they’re not. They fill your pipeline with noise, drain you of your time with follow ups, and delay an outcome you were going to reach eventually anyway.
Salespeople accept maybes because maybes preserve hope. A no feels like failure. A maybe feels like “still in play.” But you’re not in play… you’re just a Prisoner of Hope. The deal isn’t moving forward, you just haven’t admitted it yet.
If you’re getting maybes, it’s because you didn’t do your job on the call. You weren’t direct enough. You got uncomfortable and let the prospect off the hook.
The way to get a clear answer is to ask a clear question. “Does it make sense for us to take a look?” Not a soft version of that. The direct version. Then sit in that silence after you’ve asked it and let the prospect answer.
If the answer is no, ask why. Maybe it is a genuine no, and you find that out now instead of after three follow-up calls that go unanswered. More often, there’s an objection you can address and you end up booking the meeting.
Sales tactics, playbooks, and revenue strategy. From a 3× acquisition CRO.
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