DEALMAKERSCold calling in B2B
Cold calling agency: people on the phone, not a call centre script
We take on your B2B cold calling: find suitable companies with a current need, call the person in charge directly, lead the first conversation, qualify it and hand over a meeting with a note. On the phone sit experienced salespeople, not a shift operation with a quantity target.
We do not open with a round of introductions but with a concrete reason to call that our AI finds in public sources. How far we go is your decision: up to the meeting, up to qualification or, if you wish, up to the signature.
Who is calling here
The figures behind it
around 20years of B2B
Building, leading, training, own quota on the phone.
over 200 %quota
In peak periods close to 400 %, several times a spot award as top sales performer DACH.
20+clients since 2021
From SaaS, consulting and fintech.
up to 50 %reached, 40 % a meeting
Where trigger, direct number and live availability come together. How that works.
Percentages are peak values, not an average. Basis of the figures: figures from our projects.
Roles and projects of our founder
Companies our founder worked for in sales or looked after in projects – partly as an employee, partly as a service provider.
Where the line runs
Cold calling agency or call centre: the difference starts before the call
A call centre organises reach. That can be right for service or simple enquiries. In B2B appointment setting for offerings that need explaining, however, the work sits inside the conversation: understand the trigger, place the roles, take up questions and, after the second objection, not move on to the next record. That takes people with sales practice of their own.
At DEALMAKERS the calls are made by fixed sales partners from our own network. They have years of their own B2B sales experience. There are no staff trained up at short notice, no dialling machine and no target for calls per hour. Anyone only looking for the next tick does not hear the difference between a final no and one that is still open.
| Feature | Cold calling agency | Call centre logic |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | A specific trigger and a clear objective | List and contact volume |
| Staffing | Experienced B2B salespeople | Frequently changing shifts |
| Conversation | A framework with your own wording | Script with a prescribed word order |
| Pace | Follows the conversation | Follows the cadence |
| Second objection | Is placed in context | Often leads to the exit path |
| Access to the decision maker | Person, topic and often the direct line are known beforehand | Put-through rate as a metric |
| Success | A qualified meeting and its context | Contact, conversation or dial attempt |
| Documentation | A note for the next step | A closing code in the system |
If you want to set up prospecting across several channels as one process, our new client acquisition agency is the better fit. When we call and what the law says is covered on our German page Kaltakquise-Agentur. This page deliberately stays with the craft on the phone.
We do not call down a list, we call on a trigger.
Trigger before list
Why the phone still works in B2B
A phone call clarifies in a few sentences whether a topic is relevant now, later or not at all. That does not work through volume or persistence, but when the opening connects a public event with the offering in a way anyone can follow.
Which company is due right now is reported by our AI agent. It continuously watches job adverts, company news, the commercial register and LinkedIn posts and recognises more than 40 kinds of trigger – your market decides which of them count. This is not a chatbot you feed with single prompts: the agent watches the whole target market every day, records each trigger with source and date, names the person in charge and prepares the first sentence. That cuts the preparation per call from 30 to 40 minutes to about five.
The tools come from PrioX, the AI agency for the entire sales process that DEALMAKERS founder Florian Weippert co-founded; the approach is called Signal Based Selling. What an AI agent in sales does is set out in our German guide KI-Agenten im Vertrieb.
The first sentence names only this single, openly visible event, never a pattern we have observed. For example: “Last week you advertised two sales roles in Vienna. Who owns the decision at your end on how the first conversations there come about?” Or: “Your website has been announcing the new product line since Monday. Is the pipeline for it already a topic with you?” Both sentences stay with the trigger and do not overlay it with an interpretation.
Which triggers count for you is something we settle together before the start – including signals that only mean something in your market, such as a framework contract running out or a change in a standard. Tell us what your market reacts to – we take it in.
How it usually goes
Call without a trigger
- Us“Good morning, I am calling because we support companies with B2B sales. Do you have two minutes?”
- Other side“Not interested, thank you.”
Conversation over
How it goes with us
Call with a trigger
- Us“Last week you announced the Leipzig site. Who decides at your end how the first client conversations there come about?”
- Other side“That runs through me. What is this about exactly?”
- Us“About exactly those first conversations. May I ask you two short questions on that?”
- Other side“Go ahead.”
Conversation continues
Example conversation. Reproduced in substance, not recorded word for word.
The craft
The structure of a call in five phases
We stay with the example above – the advertised sales role for the new site. The sentences in the cards below serve only to make the point clear; in your case there is a different trigger, a different role and a different question. The sequence stays, the content is written anew for your market.
A good first conversation needs no monologue, it needs a framework. The first twenty seconds create permission, not pressure to close. Only once role and trigger are confirmed or corrected does a question about a meeting make sense.
-
1. Name the trigger: 0:00–0:20
The sentence is short and verifiable: “You have advertised the lead role for the new site.” Then comes the question of who is responsible. No hidden display of research, no assessment of the company.
-
2. Get permission: 0:20–0:40
“Have I caught you for two short questions on the sales side?” That gives the person a way out. Whoever does not offer it rarely gets usable answers.
-
3. Clarify the situation: 0:40–1:30
One open question is enough: “How are you currently winning first meetings for the new region?” Then listen. The pause after the question is part of the conversation, not a mistake.
-
4. Understand the objection: 1:30–3:00
“No need” can mean: wrong moment, wrong role or a genuine refusal. Experience shows in asking first instead of reading out the next sentence of the script.
-
5. Agree the next step: to 4:00
Where topic and role fit, the meeting becomes concrete: participants, duration, question and time. Where they do not, a later window or a clean close is recorded.
This is a different brief from new client acquisition as a complete service: here it becomes particularly visible whether the person on the phone can lead on the substance. An experienced caller answers the second objection with a question or an honest close. A script often only supplies the next pre-written sentence.
Nor do we necessarily stop at the meeting. On request we carry the cycle further: accompany the proposal, follow up, negotiate and close within the price range you release. For deep technical questions we bring in your people. Only the care of your existing clients is something we do not take on – that is account management and lives on history and a relationship that has grown.
No trick needed
Why the gatekeeper rarely comes up with us
Half the trade trains how to get past reception. We ask the question before that: why do we end up there at all? As a rule we know who is responsible and what is currently occupying that person, and we have the direct line or the mobile number. The gatekeeper is then simply not in play – there is nothing to get around.
And where somebody does stand in between, it is not a trick that decides but the trigger. “It is about the sales role for Vienna that has been advertised since Monday” is something completely different for an assistant from “I have a question about sales”. A specific, verifiable reason gives them a basis to decide – and that same reason later carries the meeting. No false name, no invented call back: whoever needs that has no trigger.
The voice decides too – from the first “hello”
A “hello” lasting under a second is enough for listeners to form a first impression of the caller (McAleer et al., 2014). Before the person opposite has assessed your first sentence on its content, they have long since filed the caller away. That runs through the pitch at the end of the sentence. If it goes up, every sentence sounds like a request for permission – the typical sound of the run-of-the-mill seller who is not sure whether they may interrupt. We deliberately work with the falling pitch, the Downwards Inflection: the sentence ends lower than it began. That is the tone in which people give information instead of asking for something.
Chris Voss, for years a lead negotiator at the FBI, calls the calm, warm, downward variant the “late-night FM DJ voice”: slow, warm, falling. It takes pace out of the conversation instead of winding it up – and a calm counterpart is the condition for being listened to at all. Three places make the difference here: giving your own name, the trigger sentence and the question about a meeting. The question about a meeting above all. That cannot be handed out as a script, somebody has to be able to do it – and it is one of the reasons why no temporary staff sit on the phone with us.
The lever before the call
We call when somebody is really at their desk
The most common reason a call fails is not the person at the other end but the moment. Whoever dials a list from top to bottom catches a large part of their target group in the middle of a meeting. So we do not guess when somebody is free – we check it. Our app shows live whether the person is in a meeting right now and when they will be free again, and we place the call in that free time. That alone reaches up to 60 per cent more of the people we want to speak to.
Together with the direct line or the mobile number, that is the real lever behind our call-to-connect rate: whoever is not sitting in a meeting and whose phone rings directly will as a rule pick up. Whether the conversation turns into a meeting is then decided by the trigger – but first somebody has to answer at all. What that means in figures is shown under standard agency and DEALMAKERS.
The craft behind it
Objection handling that does not sound like objection handling
What you know: the caller hears “no need” and adds a counter-argument learned by heart. That is the standard school – and it fails precisely because the person opposite recognises it within two seconds. For us an objection is not a statement that has to be refuted but the only real information we get at that moment. Three sentences carry the way we lead a conversation:
Calm first, then talk
As long as somebody is in defensive mode they hear no arguments – they are looking for the exit. The first task on the phone is not persuasion but a calm counterpart. Everything else comes after that or not at all.
Pressure never comes from us
We do not create urgency, we make the existing urgency visible. The reason to act lies in their situation, not in our offering. Whoever has grasped that never has to push – and is brushed off less often.
Rapport is a precondition
Nobody buys from someone they experience as an opponent. That is why we practically never contradict on the phone. Agreeing and still making progress is a technique, not a character trait.
In the conversation itself that looks as follows. The table below collects examples of typical situations, not a catalogue we work through and not a complete enumeration – in a real conversation what counts is what the person opposite actually says.
| Situation | What most people do | What we do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Before an objection even comes | straight into the pitch | We say the worst thought out loud ourselves: “You probably get three calls like this a day, and most of them are a waste of your time.” A reproach you voice yourself can no longer be used against you. |
| “Not interested.” | add another benefit argument | We ask forwards rather than for the why: “What specifically would have to improve for a conversation to be worth your while?” A “why” produces justification, a question about the future produces criteria. |
| “We already have a provider.” | run the competitor down | We first separate a pretext from an objection: “Assuming that were solved – would it then be a topic for you?” Only a genuine objection can be worked with, a pretext only costs time. |
| “We lose too much time in coordination.” | offer a solution immediately | We mirror the last words and stay silent: “Time in coordination?” – then a pause. What the person opposite says into that silence is worth more than any argument we could have made. |
| “Send me an email.” | send a PDF and never hear anything again | “An email – so that I do not send you anything irrelevant: may I ask two short questions?” And if it was a polite brush-off after all, we make the exit easy: “If you mean simply anything at all, that is a no as well – entirely fine. Is that closer to it?” |
| “Not right now, maybe next quarter.” | “When may I call again?” | We let them state the consequence themselves: “If it stays like this until next quarter – what does that mean for hitting your targets?” |
| Agreement that is not agreement | tie down the meeting quickly | We summarise their situation until they say “exactly”. Before that it is politeness, after it is agreement – and a meeting built on politeness falls through. |
| A yes that came too easily | be pleased | We offer a protective no: “Would it be completely wrong to look at this together for 20 minutes?” Whoever is allowed to say no feels safe – and says yes surprisingly often afterwards. |
These techniques come from negotiation and sales psychology, not from call centre guidelines, and they cannot be handed out as a script – they only work once somebody has practised them a thousand times. That is exactly what we pass on to your team in B2B sales training. There is more on it in our German guide Einwandbehandlung.
The difference in figures
Standard agency and DEALMAKERS: same day, different figures
A classic cold calling agency works through a list: call the switchboard, convince the gatekeeper, recite the pitch, next number. In our experience, 100 dial attempts that way lead to 10 to 20 conversations and one to three meetings. That is what we see without AI and without direct lines – and the reason why cold calling is regarded as a pure numbers game.
We turn three screws before a single number is dialled. We only call when the person is available: our app shows live whether they are in a meeting and when they will be free again. We have the direct line or the mobile number, so there is no switchboard in between. And we have a trigger that carries the meeting by itself. Where all three come together, 100 dial attempts lead to up to 50 conversations and 20 meetings under optimal conditions: half of the people are reached, and 40 per cent of those conversations turn into a meeting.
| What shapes the day | Standard agency | DEALMAKERS |
|---|---|---|
| Access to the person | Switchboard and gatekeeper, name often unknown | Person known by name, usually direct line or mobile number |
| Timing of the call | List from top to bottom | Deliberately when the decision maker is free, shown live by our app |
| Opening of the call | Introduction and pitch | A verifiable trigger from public sources |
| Preparation per call | 30 to 40 minutes of research | about 5 minutes with AI, up to 90 % less research time |
| Call-to-connect rate | 10 to 20 % | in part up to 50 % |
| Meetings out of conversations | one to three out of 10 to 20 conversations | in part up to 40 % |
| Who sits on the phone | Shift operation with a quantity target | Salespeople with closing experience of their own |
| What reaches you | Address list and raw meetings | A meeting with trigger, note and next step |
The 50 and the 40 per cent are peak values under optimal conditions – not an average and not a promise. Before the start we give you the range for your target group instead of promising a fixed number of meetings and reaching it later through the definition of “meeting”. With a very narrow target group or high complexity the figures are lower – but the value per meeting rises.
Transparency
How we secure quality
Cold calling must not disappear into a report. Quality is measured on the conversation and on the handover, not only on dial attempts. At the start, and whenever needed, we listen in on calls, check notes and discuss wording, objections, availability and meeting quality every week. Which sales KPIs are worth tracking beyond dial attempts is set out in our German guide KPIs im Vertrieb.
Notes record the trigger, the role, the objection, the meeting status and the next step. That lets your sales team pick up from there. It prevents calendar slots without context.
Already have a CRM or a client list? Then we first call the companies in it where something is happening right now; the selection is made by the AI of PrioX, the AI agency for the entire sales process that DEALMAKERS founder Florian Weippert co-founded. How this fits an existing scoring is set out under signals and scoring.
If you do not want to build prospecting capacity of your own, sales outsourcing orders calling, research and handover as a process. The building blocks are set out in our German page Kosten für Vertriebsoutsourcing.
Frequent questions
Questions about the cold calling agency
What does cold calling cost per meeting?
A price per meeting only makes sense once meeting quality, target group and follow-up work have been agreed, so we settle these criteria first. At DEALMAKERS you usually pay a fixed hourly rate plus a success fee, depending on the experience of the person calling for you, your offer and the sales cycle. Every engagement starts with a test phase of 40 hours.
How many calls does one meeting take?
Without preparation it takes 30 to 100 dial attempts for one qualified meeting in our experience. With AI selection, direct lines and a live view of who is available it takes far fewer in suitable projects, around five under optimal conditions. A dial attempt is not a conversation: several attempts can concern the same person. How many are needed depends on availability, trigger, offering and on whether the meeting is agreed with the right role.
When is the best time for B2B calls?
There is no fixed time of day. Our app shows live whether the person is in a meeting right now and when they will be free again – we time the call by that instead of following a blanket rule.
Do you work with scripts?
No, we work with an agreed call framework, not with a word-for-word script. Trigger, objective, permitted statements, questions and meeting criteria are prepared. The actual response to questions, pauses and the second objection is led by the person on the phone. Otherwise a call sounds like a text module and ends accordingly early.
Does an AI make the calls?
No. AI does the preparation, as described under why the phone still works. The call itself is made by an experienced salesperson, because a meeting comes from listening, follow-up questions and trust, not from a well-written text.
Do you call under our name?
We settle that clearly before we start. Depending on the project we speak openly as the sales agency you have engaged, or in the agreed name of your company. In both cases name, role and trigger stay correct. We do not use false names and do not create the impression of an employment that does not exist.
Is cold calling allowed in B2B?
Towards companies, telephone advertising can be permissible under the conditions of the German Act against Unfair Competition, in particular where presumed consent may be considered because of a factual link to the business of the person called. Whether that applies in the individual case depends on the offering, the contact and the approach. We call in a business context only, without recorded announcements, automatic dialling systems or false names. This is guidance, not legal advice; in case of doubt have the specific case checked legally.
How do you get past the gatekeeper?
Usually we do not need to, because we know the person in charge beforehand and often have their direct line. Where the route does run through the switchboard, we name the trigger, our own role and the person we want to speak to, and we respect a no.
What counts as a qualified meeting?
A qualified meeting is a firmly agreed conversation with a role that owns the topic or decides on it alongside others. There is a comprehensible trigger, a topic that has been discussed and a clear next step. A calendar slot without interest, without context or with the wrong person does not count as a qualified meeting for us.
Do we receive call notes?
Yes. For every relevant conversation we record the trigger, the contact, the reaction, objections, the agreed next step and the meeting status. The note is meant to help your sales team, not to simulate a long transcript. The weekly review additionally shows you which objections and which time windows keep recurring.
How many meetings per week are realistic?
We do not plan per week but per list: in suitable projects, a focused list of around 200 companies gives about 20 qualified meetings a month, roughly five a week. That is not a promise. With narrow target groups, complex offerings or poor availability the figure is lower. We only judge the number once the objective and the call criteria are set.
What sets you apart from a call centre?
A call centre organises reach with shifts and quantity targets; with us, experienced B2B salespeople from our own network lead the conversation. Before every call there is a specific, publicly visible trigger.
Are you a telemarketing agency?
If telemarketing means B2B telephone prospecting, that is, calling companies with the aim of a meeting: yes. We do not work like a classic telemarketing call centre with a script and dial volume, though, but with experienced B2B salespeople who call when there is a reason. We do not call consumers.
Do you also handle the meeting confirmation?
Yes, where it is part of the agreed process. The meeting is then confirmed with time, participants, topic and the context agreed in the call. Cancellations or postponements are documented as such. Final responsibility for running the specialist conversation stays with your team, which can represent the solution itself, unless we run that conversation ourselves.
Place cold calling clearly
In the first call we clarify target group, trigger, meeting criteria and whether calling is the right fit. You can also reach us through our contact page.