It can be very understandable for a salesperson to have questions around how many cold calls should I make to a prospect before either moving on or before starting to appear to be a pest. We will try to outline a process in this blog post and attached video to give you some ideas to think about regarding that question.

 

You are Most Likely not Calling Enough

Before we outline a process to answer the question of how many cold calls should I make to a prospect, first realize that you are probably not calling your prospect enough in terms of call attempts. One reason to operate with this assumption is that, when calling B2B, decision-makers are rarely in their office as they can often spend the majority of their day in meetings or can be out of the office traveling on business.

This means that, if you are calling someone at their desk and they are rarely there, you will need to call a number of times to simply time it right so that you catch them at their desk when you call.

 

Use a Mix of Voicemail Messages and Calls without a Voicemail Message

If you are going to call the prospect a lot, you will want to skip leaving a voicemail message on most call attempts, as this will provide you with more freedom to keep calling back without looking too much like a “sales stalker”.

When thinking about how many times to cold call a prospect, you can call a prospect multiple times in a day or in a week if you don’t leave a message as you are operating under the assumption that you missed them and they don’t know to call you back so you are calling them back again, and this is perfectly acceptable to do in fairly short time windows.

Although the voicemail box is one vehicle you have to try to communicate with a prospect, so even though most of your calls will not include a voicemail message, you do want to leave a voicemail message on some of those attempts so that you can leave some sort of commercial message about why the prospect might want to talk with you at some point.

 

Try to Communicate to the Prospect Using  a Variety of Communications Methods

Prospects are hard to get a hold of so it can also help to try to reach the prospect in different ways. We have talked about calling them and leaving voicemail messages periodically. Add to that try to cold email messages,voicemail follow-up emails for those calls where you do leave messages, direct mail, messages on social media, etc.

 

An Example of a Call Cadence

We use a call cadence process to help with how many cold calls to make to a prospect, as this will provide a structure for how to organize all of the call attempts, emails, calls with voicemail messages, and calls without voicemail messages. This call cadence is broken down into four rounds of trying to reach out to the prospect, and here is what to do in each round:

Round 1: This is your first time reaching out, and we think you should call and email the prospect first. After that, go ahead and leave them a voicemail message. You can also send a voicemail follow-up email depending on how much time is between your first email and your voicemail message. Since you are leaving a voicemail message, we recommend that you pause for a few days to a week.

Round 2: After the pause period expires, reach back out and, this time call multiple times without leaving a voicemail. After either 1 to 2 weeks or 5 to 10 call attempts, leave another voicemail message and send a voicemail follow-up email, and then pause again.

Round 3: After the pause from Round 2 expires, call the prospect again, similar to how you did in Round 2 without leaving a voicemail, and if you cannot get connected with the prospect in 1 to 2 weeks or 5 to 10 call attempts, leave another voicemail message and send a voicemail follow-up email and pause again. This is also a good time to try to see if there is another contact in the prospect’s organization to try to reach.

Round 4: Round 4 is similar to Rounds 2 and 3 in terms of activities, except if you still cannot get a hold of the prospect after the call attempts in Round 4, you can then consider closing the prospect as a lead and begin to move on and stop calling the prospect.

We hope this helps you with some ideas or a process to use to answer the question of how many cold calls should I make to a prospect.