How many cold calls does it take to win one B2B client?
Usually 50–200 calls on a targeted list: 100 calls bring roughly 3–7 meetings, and 10–25% of meetings become deals. On a fully cold list it can take far more.
The number comes from a simple chain. Out of 100 calls you reach about 25 people, book 3–7 meetings in most industries, and 10–25% of those meetings turn into revenue. That puts the call-to-customer rate at around 0.5–2%, as laid out in our article on how many customers 100 cold calls bring. In other words, one new client per 50–200 calls.
A worked example: you want two new clients a month. At 1% call-to-customer you need 200 calls a month, about 10 per working day. At 0.5% you need 400, or 20 a day. Then put a price on it: at around €20 per call attempt in time and overhead, 50–200 calls cost €1,000–4,000 per client before any delivery cost.
The spread is wide because the offer and the warm-up matter more than the dialling. The same rep booked 3–4 meetings per 100 calls for large IT systems, 6–7 for smaller SaaS tools and up to 17 for niche security products, after connecting with each prospect on LinkedIn first. Dialling an unresearched list with no warm-up is slower still, and a single meeting can then take several hundred dials.
Work out your own number
- 1Track two weeks of callsLog dials, conversations, meetings and deals for every call. Two weeks give a first baseline; a quarter gives a reliable one.
- 2Calculate calls per meetingDivide dials by meetings booked. If this number is high, check your pickup rate and list quality first.
- 3Multiply by meetings per dealIf one meeting in five closes, multiply calls per meeting by five. The result is your calls per client.
- 4Put a price on itMultiply calls per client by the cost of one call, including salary and tools, to see your customer acquisition cost for this channel.
- 5Fix the weakest stepA better list raises connects, a warm-up raises meetings and a sharper offer raises deals. Improve one step at a time.
- 6Compare with a call-first channelSet the result against a channel that starts with the conversation. On Meetcatcher, credits are charged only when a call with the decision maker takes place, so the cost per conversation is known upfront.
Cold calling spends most of its effort before the first real conversation. Once you know your own calls-per-client number, you can decide whether to call more, call better or move part of the budget to channels where the conversation comes first.