Cold calling involves contacting a business prospect with no advance notice in hopes of piquing their interest.
According to Cognism’s 2025 State of Cold Calling Report, 65.6% of cold calls lead to a conversation, which is the first step toward a sale. Orum’s State of Sales Development report finds that 51% of business leads come from phone calls, making cold calling a viable form of outreach, even in the internet age.
Read on to learn a step-by-step approach to cold calling and gain real-world insights from founders and executives who’ve used cold calling to reach potential customers and make sales.
What is cold calling?
Cold calling is contacting a potential customer or business partner by phone without any prior relationship or notification. There’s no preliminary introduction, no previous email exchange, no signal that the person on the other end is expecting your call. You call them without warning, pitch your product or service, and stand ready for any response.
Cold calling traces back to the days of door-to-door selling, and it hasn’t gone away. It’s changed shape. Today’s most effective cold calls are backed by research, timed strategically, and used as one piece of a broader, multichannel outreach strategy rather than a standalone tactic.
Cold calling vs. warm calling vs. lead nurturing
These three terms describe different stages of the same relationship-building process:
-
Cold calling. Cold calling means contacting someone who has no existing relationship with your business and isn’t expecting your call.
-
Warm calling. This tactic involves calling someone who already has some familiarity with your brand. Known as warm leads, these people may have downloaded a resource, attended a webinar, or followed your business on social media.
-
Lead nurturing. This is the process of building a relationship with a prospect over time, through emails, content, and touchpoints, until they’re ready to buy (or ready for that warm call).
Cold calling is typically the first touch in a sales process. Lead nurturing is what happens after that first touch, regardless of whether it results in an immediate sale.
Does cold calling still work?
Cold calling still works, but its efficacy is declining. According to Cognism’s 2025 State of Cold Calling Report, the average call-to-booked-meeting rate was just 2.3%, down from 4.82% the year before.
Persistence can matter more than most sales reps expect. Cognism’s data shows it typically takes three attempts to connect with a lead. Giving up after one or two tries means missing most potential connections before the conversation even starts.
For some founders, cold calling is a key part of the job as a leader.
“I feel like I’m a salesperson,” says Tique Chandler, founder of Chandler Honey, on the Shopify Masters podcast. “My job is to always be selling my product, sending cold emails, cold calling stores, doing demos at stores.”
When do ecommerce businesses use cold calling?
- Wholesale account acquisition
- Retailer and distributor outreach
- Corporate and bulk-order sales
- High-ticket and repeat-purchase products
Few ecommerce brands cold call their retail customers, but plenty of them cold call other businesses. Here’s where the tactic tends to show up:
Wholesale account acquisition
Brands trying to sell to new wholesale buyers often start with a cold call to a purchasing manager. It’s a faster way to gauge interest than sending a product catalog into the void and hoping for a reply. Shopify’s wholesale channel tools make it easy to convert that initial phone conversation into a self-serve B2B (business to business) storefront once a buyer says yes.
Original Duckhead founder Morgan Cros treats cold outreach as a numbers game with a known success rate. As Morgan explains on the Shopify Masters podcast, repetition is key.
“It takes about eight to 10 touchpoints to convert a retailer,” Morgan says. “That’s what I like to tell my team so that they don’t get discouraged.”
Retailer and distributor outreach
Getting a product onto physical shelves or into a distributor’s catalog often still starts with a phone call. By Rosie Jane founder Rosie Jane Johnston built her early retail footprint this way, cold calling cosmetics boutiques directly and pushing past the discomfort of rejection.
"If you don’t make the call or turn up at the store, you’re never going to get the sale,” she says on Shopify Masters.
Mackage cofounder Eran Elfassy is similarly persistent. On Shopify Masters, Eran says he called one buyer so many times about an apparel collection that he eventually talked his way into a 10-minute meeting—and that set him up for his big sale.
“The owner of the company ends up walking down the hallway, and sees one of the jackets. The buyer’s like, ‘OK, here’s your order, and make me 48 pieces,’” Eran says. “They sold out over one weekend.”
Corporate and bulk-order sales
Businesses that want to buy in volume—for employee gifts, event swag, or office supplies—are a natural fit for cold outreach. A sales rep who calls a corporate office manager or procurement lead can use the conversation to offer a bulk pricing quote based on the buyer’s exact needs.
Chandler Honey’s Tique landed one of her biggest early sales this way.
“I had some really good wins in my first year,” she says. “Bell Canada, for example, was looking for someone to supply honey to put in an employee appreciation box. They placed an order for, I want to say it was 2,000 jars.”
Tique was in the right place at the right time. This was made possible by her choice to make a B2B cold call to a telecommunications company, who you wouldn’t assume would buy honey in bulk.
High-ticket and repeat-purchase products
For big-ticket items like furniture, equipment, high-end electronics, cold calling can help close deals that are too complex or too high-stakes for a buyer to complete through a website checkout alone. The same is true for products with a predictable repurchase cycle, like consumables or supplies. There a call can lock in a recurring order before a competitor gets there first.
4 steps for effective cold calling
- Conduct research
- Prepare scripts and practice talking points
- Open the call (or leave a message)
- Close the call (and take next steps)
Even if you aren’t a natural extrovert, you can make cold calling simple and efficient by approaching it as a sequence of steps.
1. Conduct research
Conduct research to know who you’re calling and why before you dial. Pull the business’s size and industry, and identify any obvious fit with your product so your first call sounds informed, not generic.
First Day founder Alice Li used this strategy to find advisers while learning about the vitamin industry. She dedicated extensive time to researching and cold-emailing hundreds of academics at universities like Harvard, Yale, and MIT. Only a handful replied, but two became key advisers. As Alice tells the Shopify Masters podcast, founders need to tolerate “a little bit of rejection and grit” to find the right people.
2. Prepare scripts and practice talking points
Write a loose script, not a word-for-word one, and rehearse it until it sounds natural.
Candier founder Krysten Kauder built her cold-pitching process around a tight formula. First, say the name of the person who takes your call. Then get to the pitch.
“You just need to get to the point,” Krysten says on Shopify Masters. “I always keep mine to literally three or four sentences, and the last sentence is always, ‘I’d love to send over the product if you’re interested.’”
3. Open the call (or leave a message)
Give whoever answers your call a good reason to remain on the line. Lead with something specific to them, not a generic pitch, to earn yourself the rest of the conversation. If you get sent to voicemail, leave a succinct message and prepare to call back—mind Morgan Cros’s experience that it may take 8 to 10 touchpoints to convert your target.
4. Close the call (and take next steps)
Every call should end with a clear next step, whether that’s a meeting, a follow-up email, or a sample shipment.
Even a “no” is worth closing well, Sabai Design furniture founder Phantila Phataraprasit says on Shopify Masters.
“It was very much a cold outreach process—kind of spraying and praying at the same time, because you’re just increasing your chances when you do that,” Phantila says. “We were just very persistent. And if someone said no, we’d ask for a referral.”
Shopify has tools to help B2B salespeople optimize their new prospects and customers. Once a cold call converts, they can set up the prospect as a B2B customer with custom catalogs and pricing. Sales reps who close deals via phone or email can use Shopify to create draft orders sent to customers while still on the phone.
Cold calling best practices
- Know the rules before you dial
- Let the data pick your calling window
- Personalize past the name
- Prepare responses to objections
The basics of cold calling are simple: research the company, reach the right person, and open with something more compelling than a generic sales pitch for your product or service. Here are some cold calling tips to make your next cold call your best one yet:
Know the rules before you dial
In the US, B2B calls to a verified business landline are generally exempt from the National Do Not Call Registry. Personal cell numbers used for business fall under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act’s residential protections. Calling windows are typically capped at 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the recipient’s local time zone. Check the rules for your state and market before calling.
Let the data pick your calling window
Cognism’s 2025 State of Cold Calling Report names Tuesday as the strongest day for calls. Conversations in the 10–11 a.m. and 2–3 p.m. windows tend to run longer and more productively than early-morning or end-of-day attempts, when a call is more likely to catch someone at a bad time.
Personalize past the name
Show the decision makers on the other end of the line that they’re unique individuals by leveraging basic information (e.g., company name, job title) from customer data, a quick search on Google, or social media. This personalizes your sales call and helps you make the case that your product or service is right for the specific person you’re talking to.
Prepare responses to objections
A short list of cold calling scripts for the objections that come up most (e.g., “we already have a vendor,” “send me an email instead,” “we don’t have budget”) can empower sales representatives to turn a skeptical prospect into a warm lead. Cold calling success doesn’t come from arguing the objection away. Keep the deal moving forward by identifying the prospect’s real concern and pain points. Then shift toward the value in your product or services.
Cold calling FAQ
What do you mean by cold calling?
Cold calling is the practice of contacting a potential customer or business partner by phone without any prior relationship or advance notice.
Is cold calling a hard job?
Making cold calls is harder than communicating with prospects who already know and understand your business. But it’s nonetheless an effective outreach tool. Some 51% of business leads come from phone calls, according to Orum’s State of Sales Development report.
What is a cold call example?
An example of a cold call is a shoe manufacturer calling a department store—with no prior invitation to do so—and pitching them on the idea of stocking their shoes.
