Cold calling works

Just wanted to share that we've cold called for a few of our searcher clients now, and cold calling works well if done right.

The problem is...it's easy to waste time cold calling. When we were just calling company phone numbers, it was a total waste of time - would never get connected to the owner (operators wouldn't transfer, phone trees, etc.)

We've found that cold calling works super well if you fully commit to it across people/process/technology.

People: it takes a certain type of person to do cold calls. We have a certain subset of our VAs that focus specifically on cold calling, because it takes a certain mindset (it can be brutal and frankly demeaning at times, as people can be rude)

Process: cold calling inherently can't scale, because a human has to call. So it's best to prioritize your time - we do this by primarily focusing on folk who have opened emails a few times but never replied, or by prioritizing the leads most likely to pick up (see tools below)

Technology: We try to be as efficient as possible, and found certain tools to be tremendously helpful. Specifically:
- Personal phone database (this can be quite expensive. We built an internal scraper for TruePeopleSearch which we use for clients, and have anecdotally found RocketReach to have pretty good mobile coverage in the US)
- Auto dialer (essentially makes dialing phone numbers easier - there are a lot of options out there but we use Trellus)
- Phone validation/lead scoring (we use sureconnect.ai - they essentially score a list of phone numbers and help us prioritize the portion of the list that likely has a >15% connect rate)