Ask ThinkWork: 'My Reps Say Cold Calling Doesn't Work Anymore. Are They Right?'
A sales leader wrote in with the question every VP of Sales is dodging. Here's the answer, unhedged.
A VP of Sales at a mid-sized SaaS business wrote in with a version of the question landing in my inbox more than any other right now: "Half my reps have quietly stopped dialling. They've moved to LinkedIn touches and email sequences and tell me cold calling doesn't work anymore. Are they right, or do I have a management problem dressed up as a market one?" Here's what I told them, without the hedging I'd normally put in front of a paying client.
The short answer
You almost certainly don't have a channel problem. You have a skill-variance problem that's found a more comfortable channel to hide in.
Give the environment its due, then take most of it back
Connect rates on cold calls are genuinely down on ten years ago — spam-likely tagging, caller ID, a culture of screening unknown numbers by default. That part of the complaint is true and I won't pretend otherwise. But if the channel itself were actually dead, variance across reps on identical lists would collapse towards zero, because nobody could make it work regardless of skill. What I see instead, almost every time I pull the data, is variance that's wide — sometimes very wide — which is the opposite signal. A dead channel flattens everyone equally. A skill gap doesn't.
The diagnostic, before anyone reallocates a single pound of budget
- Pull the last full month of dial activity segmented by individual rep, not rolled into a team average. Team averages are where skill gaps go to hide.
- Match reps against comparable territories and list quality. A rep working a four-year-old contact list will always underperform one working a fresh one, and that's not a skill problem — control for it before you conclude anything.
- Compare connect-to-meeting conversion, top quartile against bottom quartile, on those matched conditions only.
- If the spread is worse than roughly two-to-one on matched lists, you're looking at a skill floor, not a dead channel. The channel was identical for both groups. Only the person changed.
- Listen to five calls each from your best and worst performer on that metric — specifically the first twenty seconds and the first stall or objection they hit, not a general impression of "vibe."
The Cold Call Talk-to-Listen Ratio Scorecard is a useful concrete lens for step five, because it turns "this rep sounds worse" into a number you can actually compare across calls rather than an opinion you're arguing about in a one-to-one. Once the pattern is confirmed, the Sales Skills Self-Assessment is the right next step for the reps themselves — it turns a manager's diagnosis into something the rep can see and own, rather than a verdict handed down.
When it genuinely is the channel
To be fair to the reps who raised it: there are segments where cold calling really has stopped working, and the tell is different from the one above. If you're selling into, say, enterprise security or IT leadership, where every VP gets dozens of cold calls a week and screens all of them as a matter of policy, you'll see variance collapse rather than widen — your best rep struggles almost as much as your worst, because the gatekeeping is structural, not a matter of individual skill. That's a real signal, and in that specific segment, shifting weight toward something like the Multichannel Outbound Cadence Framework is the right call. But notice the shape of the evidence required: it's a segment-by-segment finding, not a verdict on the channel as a whole, and it only holds once you've ruled out the far more common explanation first.
What I told the VP to actually do
Don't kill cold calling org-wide this quarter on the strength of a rep survey. Run the diagnostic above against this month's data before changing strategy. Then bring the findings back to the reps themselves, not just to leadership — the ones who are genuinely good at this are usually glad to have that made visible, because right now their skill is being averaged down in every conversation by teammates who've found a way to avoid dialling and call it strategy.
If the data comes back skill-gap and you shift budget to inbound anyway, because that's an easier conversation to have than telling your best-paid rep they've gone soft on the phone, that's a management decision, not a market one. Own it as that, and stop letting the channel take the blame for something an afternoon with a scorecard would have shown you.