Cold Call: An unsolicited phone call to a prospect
A cold call is an outbound phone call to a prospect who has not previously engaged, used by SDRs to book meetings for AEs.
What is Cold Call?
Cold calling is still the highest-conversion outbound channel for most B2B segments — connect rates are ~5%, but conversation-to-meeting rates can hit 20%+, outperforming email by an order of magnitude.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is cold calling dead?
- No. Industry data consistently shows cold calling outperforms cold email for booking meetings — when reps actually do it. Most teams cold-call far less than they should.
- What's a good cold call connect rate?
- 3–8% in B2B SaaS, depending on persona seniority. Conversion of connects to meetings is the metric to track.