Cold calling is dead; long live cold calling. 👑

Monarchical references aside, the phone remains the most direct and effective way to get in contact with someone.

Naysayers will tell you that no one picks up the phone. They’ll say that no one trusts the phone anymore. They’ll say that in 2024 you have to do social selling on Linkedin or SEO-driven inbound or whatever is relevant to the course they’re really trying to sell you.

Too bad that cold calling works and all you have to do is start dialing…

For the prospects, it’s a gamble

Let’s assume for a moment that you are calling mobile numbers, no desk phones or dial trees. 

Few folks will pick up an unknown number unless they’re actually expecting a call.

BUT when they do, they’ve prequalified themselves. It’s a spin at the roulette wheel. They’re willing to gamble. Maybe it is relevant. Maybe the person on the other side of the phone has a solution to whatever problem they are facing.

This means that when you ask for permission and start your pitch, you are only talking to someone who’s willing to gamble. The same is not true of other channels like cold email. 

What does the data say?

Putting theory aside. Orum’s latest State of Sales Development report shows that 51% of pipeline comes from the phone. And most companies said that over the last 12 months they saw a greater proportion of their pipeline originating from the phone.

The numbers are in and it’s clear that cold calling is far from dead; it’s actually growing.

But why do cold calls “work”?

Sure the theory is sound and the data from power dialers says it does. But why?

Simple. Cold calls work because they create urgency. Downloading and reading a whitepaper doesn’t create urgency. Emails don’t create urgency. In those situations you can read the content, mull it over, think about it over the weekend, and then move on.

But when the conversation is live, you get a prospect’s immediate reaction and feedback. You ask the questions and control the conversation. And like we talked about already, the prospect has prequalified themselves. They decided to gamble, so they’re along for the ride. 

Getting fully ramped: how to get good at cold calling

Great question. There is no trick to it. And anyone selling you a shortcut doesn’t have your best interests at heart. The only thing you’ll be doing is cheating yourself out of one of the most important skills in existence.

Like any skill, getting good at cold calling takes 10,000 hours of practice. No course or motivational speaker or article, even this one, is going to make you better.

So how do you get 10,000 hours of practice? You need a lot of at-bats. You need a lot of talk time. You need to screw up A LOT.

This means you’ll get hung up on. Yelled at. Cursed out. You’ll call the wrong number. You might even have your time wasted by someone who just enjoys a conversation and likes talking to sales reps. Trust me, that archetype does exist. 

You’ll make a fool out of yourself every once and a while, but you will learn.

Building to a fully ramped quota

If you’re a new SDR, you’ll typically have a few months before you’re expected to attain what’s known as a “fully ramped” quota. And it’ll typically be based on the number of qualified meetings that you set in a given month. For some sales orgs it’ll be as long as 10 whereas others go as high as 40. 🥵

That means that you have two or three months to learn about your product, industry, and audience and get comfortable with what you’re selling and the personas in your prospecting list.

Don’t worry too much though. If you’ve joined an established sales org, your manager and enablement team will have resources for you to learn all these things.

Onboarding, training, and your ramping period

During your onboarding you’ll typically get lots of material to read, old calls to listen to, and demos to watch. If you have a big sales enablement team they’ll provide recorded training videos and even host live ones too.

Once you’re done with the official onboarding, you’ll watch your manager call leads and then do a call break down with you afterwards where he’ll walk you through the call and explain why he said what he said.

Within a week or two, you’ll be hitting the phones too!

At first, you’ll probably be thankful every time you get an answering machine. You think that your job is to make dials, and it’s easy to cold call if no one picks up.

That’s called the “fear of the phone.” Don’t worry you’re not the first to experience it. It’s uncommon for someone to NOT have a fear of the phone when they start.

Like jumping into a freezing cold lake, cold calling can be daunting before you do it and a shock to the system when you start, but once you start swimming you’ll realize the water’s fine.

Traditional role play vs. ai sales role play

One of the most classic ways to practice your pitch and objection handling is to role play as a rep and as a customer with your manager or peer. 

That way you get to practice your pitch and objection handling skills and get immediate feedback from your coworkers. Without really knowing it, they’ll mimic past phone conversations that they’ve experienced cold calling. 

This is a great way to build your phone skills and consistently check in with your peers and manager to make sure that you’re “getting it.”

Today, you don’t have to wait for your next 1:1 with your manager to get practice and feedback. Now you can role play outside of traditional mock calls with your manager by using FullyRamped.

FullyRamped uses Generative AI to create custom, hyper-realistic Practice Prospects that sound just like the people you call everyday. We are able to tailor ai to your company-specific ICP (ideal custom profile), so that pitch to a hyper realistic ai during your ramping period.

Now, AI sales roleplay isn’t going to replace traditional mock calls and sales role play. But there’s definitely no going back. The ability to practice whenever you want and without the need for a partner means that ai sales role-play will be a huge part of sales training going forward. And those who adopt it first are going to be way out in front of their peers who rely solely on traditional mock calls.

Request a trial and to get started today!