Does B2B cold calling still work for small businesses?

At Manchester PC (opens in a new tab) we have always relied on customers finding us when something breaks. This year we started picking up the phone to other local businesses instead. Before going further, I asked a community of UK small business owners a simple question: is anyone actually making B2B cold calling work, and what conversion rates are you seeing? The answers were honest, sometimes brutal, and far more useful than I expected.

Why we tried cold calling at all

We repair computers (opens in a new tab) and provide IT support for businesses (opens in a new tab). Most of our work has come from people and businesses who search for help after something has gone wrong. That works, but it means our income depends on other people’s bad days, and on how search engines choose to send them to us.

We wanted more steady relationships with local businesses, before they need us. We are also offering newer services, such as websites, business email and automation, built on the systems we developed for our own business. So we started calling.

What conversion rates look like

Nobody gave a single magic number, and the reason is worth understanding: different people measure different things.

Cognism’s State of Cold Calling report for 2024 (opens in a new tab) put the average success rate at 4.82%, meaning 254 meetings booked from 5,265 conversations. Look at the steps before that, though. Those conversations came from 9,247 connected calls, out of 55,701 dials. Measured against dials, that is fewer than one meeting for every 200 numbers called.

One person who had worked for UK business services firms, selling mostly to companies with between 5 and 150 staff, shared figures that told a similar story:

• roughly 100 calls to book one appointment, with a good caller booking four or five a week;
• 15 to 20% of appointments cancelled or not attended;
• 25 to 33% of the appointments that went ahead turning into a sale;
• so around 300 calls for each new customer.

The most interesting point was about timing. The conversation most likely to lead to a sale was often around the eleventh one, a year to eighteen months after the first. Not eleven calls in a week, but a patient schedule of occasional check-ins. Sometimes a business only needs you when its current supplier lets it down.

Another person put it simply: track connect rate, meaningful conversations, meetings and proposals separately, because one overall conversion number hides where the problem is.

The most important lesson: relevance beats volume

The strongest advice I received was to stop calling everyone about everything.

We had been approaching too many types of business with too broad a range of services. “We’re a local IT support company, how do you handle your IT at the moment?” gives the person answering no reason to keep listening.

The approach that came up again and again was narrower:

1. Pick one sector. Dental practices, accountants, letting agents, whoever you understand best.
2. Pick one problem. Something specific that business type commonly struggles with.
3. Do your homework first. Look at their website, their business email set-up or their Google listing, and find something concrete you could genuinely help with.
4. Lead with the reason you are calling them. Say who you help and what changes for them in one breath.
5. Ask, do not pitch. One real question about how they handle the problem today is better than a script.
6. Measure properly. Test a reasonable number of calls with one message before changing it, or you will never know whether the list or the approach failed.

One business owner said they are happy to give a legitimate UK caller a few minutes, and have built great relationships that way. The catch was clear: the call had to be specific to their business. Random sales calls get nowhere.

Why so many people hate cold calls

A large share of the replies were hostile, and I think it is important to listen to them rather than dismiss them.

The best explanation came from someone who used to work in the trades. When the phone rang, he had to answer in case it was a customer. That often meant stopping work, climbing down a ladder and losing ten minutes, only to find a sales call. The first few dozen got a polite “no, thank you”. By the thousandth, the manners had gone.

That is the real cost of a cold call: it is paid by the person receiving it. For a sole trader, an unexpected call can interrupt complex work, a family meal or a job on site. Several people also warned that repeated calls get numbers reported as spam, which can then be flagged to everyone you ring.

One experienced owner, who had run small businesses for over thirty years without cold calling once, made a point I keep coming back to. IT support is built on trust. Most people’s experience of cold calls is spam and scams. A cold call asks someone to go from “this is probably a scam” to “I trust this person with my systems” in a few minutes. That is a hard journey on the wrong channel.

The legal side: TPS, CTPS and the ICO

If you do call businesses in the UK, the rules matter. They come from the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), enforced by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

• Screen against the TPS and CTPS. The ICO’s guidance on live calls (opens in a new tab) says you must not make live marketing calls to anyone who has registered their number with either service, unless they have told you they agree to your calls.
• Sole traders count as individuals. The ICO’s business-to-business guidance (opens in a new tab) explains that sole traders and some partnerships are treated the same as individual consumers, and they can register with the TPS. Companies register with the CTPS. Many local businesses are sole traders, so this catches people out.
• Never withhold your number. You must display your number, or a valid alternative, and say who is calling. If asked, you must provide contact details.
• Keep a do-not-call list. If someone tells you not to call again, record it and respect it.

The ICO notes (opens in a new tab) that it is free to add any number to the TPS list, and numbers must be on the register for 28 days for it to take effect. We built the check into our CRM. Every number is sent through an API to be screened against the TPS and CTPS before it can be called, and a number that comes back as registered cannot be dialled from the system. It is the minimum, not a badge of honour.

Alternatives to cold calling that came up

Several suggestions were practical enough that we are already trying them:

• Send findings first. Rather than calling to say what we do, check a business’s website or email set-up for a real problem (WebProjectUK’s free website and email health check (opens in a new tab) is built for exactly this), then email a short summary of what we found. If it is useful, they will reply.
• Write a personal letter, or visit. For a small, carefully chosen list of local businesses, a letter with a single-page flyer, or a short visit, shows the local approach better than any call.
• Run free local events. One person described a firm that ran free events with speakers on related subjects. For us that could be cyber security, using AI safely or backups. Attendees were followed up 30, 60 and 90 days later.
• Look after existing customers first. It is usually easier and cheaper to do more for the customers you already have than to win new ones.
• Build relationships. Networking and referrals take longer, but as one person said, people do business with people they like and trust.

Where AI fits, and where it does not

One reply described using AI agents for small-business sales and research, and I agree with where they drew the line. AI is strongest before and after the call: researching the business, suggesting a relevant opening, logging objections and drafting the follow-up. The conversation itself should stay human.

Others had noticed the opposite trend: inboxes filling with AI-written cold emails that all follow the same format. Automating outreach at volume just moves the problem from the phone to the inbox.

The follow-up is where most small businesses lose out, whether the lead came from a cold call, an event or a customer ringing in. It is the reason I am building an AI platform for service businesses around the enquiry and the follow-up, and its guide on following up a quote without annoying the customer (opens in a new tab) covers the same ground. Before spending money on finding new enquiries, it is worth counting the ones you already lose. The simplest way is to keep a simple log for one normal working week: every call, message and form, the time it came in and the time someone first replied. The Never Miss an Enquiry course, which I am still writing, will go further.

What we are doing next

So, does B2B cold calling still work for small businesses? It can, but not the way most people imagine. It is slow, the numbers are small and the cost lands on the person you interrupt. Done broadly, it annoys far more people than it helps.

What we are taking from this:

• one sector and one specific problem at a time;
• research before contact, and a clear reason for calling;
• email or a letter first where that respects people’s time better;
• every number checked against the TPS and CTPS;
• every stage tracked in our CRM, so we know where things go wrong;
• patient, spaced follow-ups, and an immediate stop for anyone who says no.

Running a small business, as I have written about in what running a small business taught me about software, is mostly about finding sustainable ways to keep work coming in. Getting out and speaking to local businesses is probably something we should have done years ago. The lesson from this discussion is to do it in a way that earns trust rather than spends it.