If you run a SaaS company, cold calling is still the quickest way to fill your calendar. It’s working better right now than it has in years.
I was one of Rippling’s first go-to-market sales development hires in Australia. Even with all of their inbound and a huge partner network, 85 to 90% of the meetings we booked came over the phone as we scaled from zero to $10M ARR in region. I now run an outbound agency where we’ve generated over seven figures in revenue for the SaaS clients we work with, and calling is still where most of it starts.
This is the whole process: how we build the list, the script we use word for word, and the numbers you should be tracking once your team starts dialling.
Why cold calling is working again
Every go-to-market team is running the same three or four tools across cold email and LinkedIn. We use them too. The result is that your buyer’s inbox is full of the same automated emails, reply rates have dropped a lot, and most of it never gets seen because it lands in spam. Even when it does get seen, you’re one of forty.
Cold calling is the one channel where you get an answer on the spot. You’re not waiting for a reply that never comes. You find out in 30 seconds whether that person has a problem you solve, and if they don’t, it’s 30 seconds gone.
One more thing worth noticing: the founder of one of the biggest AI SDR tools out there spent two years telling everyone to stop hiring humans. He’s just retired that slogan and hired his first human rep to put on the phone.
Worth saying: almost every person I dialled at Rippling had already had an email or a LinkedIn message from us. The phone closed it. The other two channels made the name familiar first. Calling on its own is a much harder job.
Step 1: Build the list from your own customers
Everything depends on who’s on the list.
We build every list from scratch, and we start with the customers a company already has. Before we look at a single new company, we go back through the client’s existing paying customers and work out what they have in common. Company size, where they’re based, what software they run, what was going wrong before they bought, and why they picked our client over the alternatives.
Then we go and find every other company that matches that description.
Blue Onion is the example I always use. They’re an accounting solution that integrates with Xero. Their best customers are e-commerce founders, financial controllers, finance managers and accounting managers. Once you know that, you know exactly which job titles to look for inside every company on the list, because those are the people with the problem.
If we’ve got a list of 10,000 companies, we’ll usually end up with about 40,000 contacts. Three or four people per company worth speaking to.
The two people you’re calling
Those contacts fall into two groups that care about completely different things.
The champion is the person dealing with the problem every day. The spreadsheet, the manual process, the thing your product removes. Most of the time they can’t sign the contract, but they’re the one who’ll argue for it internally.
The signer is usually a CFO, CEO or managing director. They don’t care that data entry is annoying. They care about risk, compliance, cost and revenue. For them you need a business case: what happens if they don’t fix it.
Same company, same product, two entirely different calls.
Signals are massively oversold
The standard advice at this point is to add a way of spotting which companies are ready to buy right now. Just raised a round. Hiring for a certain role. Running a specific bit of tech. In go-to-market we call those signals.
Some businesses genuinely have them, usually software selling to other software companies. For a finance product it might be which accounting or payroll system they run. For one of our clients selling employee video software, it’s whether a company has an out-of-date careers page.
But the go-to-market world has sold founders and sales leaders the idea that every company has signals you can track, and that if you find the signal the deal follows. That’s not true. Plenty of businesses have no signals at all and we book meetings for them every single month.
The 12 to 15 meetings a month we book for Blue Onion aren’t based on signals. The only filter is whether the company uses Shopify, because we know the product integrates with it.
You can get away without signals. You can’t get away with bad data.
Bad data kills more campaigns than bad scripts
The mistake I see most often is buying a huge list off a data provider and handing it straight to the team. Numbers go out of date. A chunk of them were never right. Your reps spend an entire session on disconnected lines and people who left the company two years ago.
Before a list reaches a rep, every row needs a name, a job title, a company and a validated mobile number. Not a switchboard, not an office line. A mobile.
The way to get there is a waterfall enrichment tool. It’s a data aggregator: if the first provider doesn’t have the mobile, it goes to the next one, then the next. That’s the difference between reps talking to buyers and reps talking to reception.
Get the list right, because the next two steps don’t work unless you do.
Step 2: The script
Before anyone writes a script, go and get two things.
First, every objection that keeps coming back in your market. Get this from whoever has been selling the product longest, usually the founder. Second, which competitors your buyers are already using, because they almost always have something in place already.
The opener
The opener you never want is “Hey John, it’s just Matty, how are you today?” It’s robotic. They’ve heard that exact pattern a thousand times and their guard is up before you’ve said anything.
Ask for permission before you pitch anything. That’s a permission-based opener. Say hi, use their name, say who you are and where you’re calling from, admit it’s a cold call, then ask for a minute.
Hey John, it’s just Matty here from Outbounda. I know I’m calling you out of the blue, we haven’t spoken before. Do you mind if I grab a minute to explain why I’m calling?
Because you asked first, their guard drops and they actually listen.
The problem statement
Once they say yes, you still don’t pitch. Name the type of people you work with, the problem those people usually have, and ask if it sounds familiar.
So John, the reason I’m reaching out is we work with founders and sales leaders at software companies like yours. What we hear is they’ve got a real focus on top of funnel and pipeline, but no big sales development team internally, so cold calling and outreach ends up on the founder’s plate. Just curious if that sounds familiar at all.
You still haven’t said what you sell. You’ve asked them a question about their own business.
If it resonates, move into discovery and ask how they’re handling it today. You’ve earned the right to drop the script and have a normal conversation.
If it doesn’t resonate, don’t fold:
Totally get that. If it did resonate you’d probably be reaching out to us, not sitting around waiting for a cold call. But just out of curiosity, how are you managing pipeline today?
Either way you’re back in the conversation, which is the only thing you’re trying to do at this stage.
The pitch and the close
Only after discovery do you pitch, and you can ask permission for that too. “That makes sense, we hear that a lot. Do you mind if I quickly explain what we do and you can see if it’s relevant?” Two or three sentences. Nothing more.
Then go for the close. You’re not asking them to buy anything, you’re asking for 20 minutes.
Would you be totally opposed to having a quick conversation to see if this could make sense for your business?
Qualifying happens after the time is agreed, not before. How long they’ve had the issue, what they’re doing about it now, how many people are in the business. Then confirm the invite has landed in their calendar and get them to accept it before you hang up.
Step 3: Track the whole sequence, not the dials
The biggest mistake I see is managing calling by dial count. You set a target of 80 a day, the team hits 80 a day, and if only one person answers it doesn’t matter whether they made 50 or 100.
I saw this recently with a client. Each rep was making around 100 calls a day, connecting with five or six people, and reaching a pitch about 35% of the time. So 100 calls produced one or two real conversations. The dial number looked completely fine. The connect rate and the pitch rate were the numbers nobody was looking at.
Count every stage instead:
Dials → connects → conversations → qualified conversations → meetings booked → meetings held.
Each number is smaller than the one before it, so you can see exactly where people drop off.
The benchmarks to aim for
- 50-100 dials per hour per rep on a power dialer
- 10% connect rate is acceptable; with the right targeting we’ve seen 20-25%
- 60%+ of connects should turn into a real conversation
Here’s a live campaign for Blue Onion: 182 dials, 23 connects, 14 conversations, two meetings booked. That’s a 12.6% connect rate. Connect-to-conversation came in at 60.9%, bang on benchmark. Conversation-to-meeting was 14.3%, which we can definitely improve.
Reading the drop-off
Plenty of dials, nobody answering? It’s the list. Wrong numbers, out of date, or you’ve got company mainlines and never get past reception.
People answering but nobody letting you pitch? It’s the first 30 seconds, and it’s almost always a rep treating a brush-off like an objection.
A brush-off is a reflex. “Send me an email”, “I’m in a meeting”, “not interested”. It happens before you’ve pitched. An objection is a real answer with a reason attached, and it comes after. You handle objections. You call out brush-offs.
Sure John, more than happy to send an email. Though usually when someone says that, it’s a nice way of telling me to buzz off. Just out of curiosity, is there anything specific you’d want in it, or are you just not interested in the conversation?
For “I’m in a meeting”:
Totally get it. How about I take 30 seconds now to explain why I’m calling, and if it doesn’t make sense I’ll never call you back.
You’ve got permission to call people out like that. Most of the time it earns their respect.
What this actually produces
With a clean list, a script that works and the numbers in front of you, a good rep can book anywhere from three to ten meetings a day.
When I started the business I had six clients and I was calling for all of them. Each was getting four to five meetings a week. That’s 20 to 30 meetings a week from the phone alone.
Our clients today average between 8 and 12 qualified meetings a month. One of them wasn’t doing any outbound at all before we started and closed three deals in their first 90 days.
None of this is complicated. It’s just a lot of work done properly in the right order, and most teams skip straight to the dialling.