Had a mentoring discussion with some fellow mentors today and when asked how many sales calls a new startup selling into the enterprise should be making a day I suggested 20 minimum.

The mentors all laughed at me, suggesting that this was way too high.

I was actually being conservative, I actually though it should be more like 40-50 but I know they definitely would have fallen over laughing.

I spent about 8 years in Corporate IT sales, 8 years cold calling for my own business and also when I took a sabbatical from tech I spent a few years selling ~$15 million of real estate (not actually a big deal in Sydney).

I am not the worlds best cold caller, I hate it, give me a warm lead any day however sometimes there is only one way to reach your prospects and that is by cold calling.

This is especially the case if you want to secure meetings and try to win business this year, not next year (or never).

Other methods are too slow or can easily be ignored. Cold calling doesn’t scale but it can get you those first 10-20 customers that will keep you alive while you work out how to create a lead generation marketing system that will scale.

I know phone usage is reducing but its still a thing in corporate land and while it is, if you are in enterprise or business sales you should be calling a minimum of 20 prospects a day. It does actually work for consumer too but its painful.

Don’t over think it, write down a script 2-3 paragraphs and pick 20 prospect names and start calling.

Linkedin is fertile ground for finding names and titles of people and often even their mobile number.

Do a search with the key attributes you need, i.e. title, city, skills et

Cut and paste 50 names into a spreadsheet,

Start calling, rinse and repeat.

You might laugh but 20 calls before 10.00 puts you in fantastic shape for the day and makes you the top 5% of sales reps for prospecting (most don’t).

If you were wondering my best ever call record for a day was 160 calls.

Thats what you call hardcore.

Image Credit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle