Cold calling can be effective in niches where people don’t check email regularly, like contractors, landscapers, or field workers. It also offers personal‑development benefits—improving your articulation on camera and your ability to pick up the phone. However, it’s not a universal solution; for many digital or automation agencies it’s unnecessary. I’ve worked across almost every agency‑friendly niche and found that high‑ROI clients tend to be those who respond to email. If your current niche forces you into cold calling, consider whether another niche could give you a higher ROI per unit of time. Cold calling can still be magic for personal growth, but there are often more efficient paths to both development and revenue.
Yes, you can make cold calling worth it, but I don't really recommend it these days. It depends on the service—some industries rely on phone calls because their customers use the phone all day and don't check email. Here's a secret: if a sales rep spends 100 minutes on calls, they're actually talking to decision‑makers for only about 15 to 20 minutes, meaning their utilization is roughly 20% and 80% of their time is wasted. One easy improvement is to increase the pickup rate by rotating numbers and eliminating ring time. Think about it: finding a number, dialing, waiting for the ring, and connecting can take a lot of time—your actual conversation might be just 30 seconds while you spend 45 seconds just getting the call set up. Auto‑dialing and removing ring delays help, especially since many people simply don't pick up anymore. Cold calling is only profitable if you build that infrastructure; if you're just starting out, you lack that support, making it even harder. I've cold‑called many thousands of people—likely over 10,000—and have done door‑to‑door for even more. I'll stop here because I'm running out of time.
Cold calling is inefficient: you spend only about 40% of your time on actual talking (10% dialing, 10% waiting for connection, 20% dealing with gatekeepers) and often never reach the decision maker. Cold email guarantees you’re speaking to the decision maker and lets you automate follow‑ups to stay top of inbox. I equate the effort of cold calling to sending cold Loom videos—Looms add video but the core effort is similar; you can skip the call time and send Looms directly via email for better pound‑for‑pound results. Cold calling does build a killer mindset, but for pure productivity cold email wins.
I wouldn’t recommend cold calling today. While it’s cheap to start—just a phone and your voice—the biggest downside is that it’s synchronous, meaning over half of your leads aren’t available when you call, cutting your efficiency in half right away. It also forces you to block time for calls, makes you vulnerable to spam patterns, and requires years of practice to become effective, with most of your time spent talking to unqualified prospects and having to convince them of your credibility. In contrast, asynchronous methods like personalized Loom videos let you work in short windows, avoid the 50% availability loss, and create a reusable asset you can send via email, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. When hyper‑customized, such videos can be seen by about two‑thirds of prospects and generate reply rates around 50 %. Spending an hour a day on Loom outreach can yield five to ten times the results of cold calling. That’s why I’ve shifted from cold email to warm inbound and scaled my agencies, and I advise you to use Loom videos for your SaaS launch.
No, not really. The math works out like this: you could call about 50 people in an hour and maybe have real conversations with 10 of them. If you spend that same hour setting up a cold‑email system, you can build infrastructure that lets you reach roughly 50,000 people. Comparing the two, 1 hour of calls reaches 50 people, while 1 hour of email outreach can reach 50,000. That’s a 1‑to‑1,000 ratio. In reality, emails are probably 50‑100 times less effective per contact than a call, meaning you need to send about 150‑times more emails to equal the effectiveness of a single call. Even so, per unit of time cold emailing ends up being roughly 20 times more effective than cold calling.