30 days cold call challenge retrospective

12d (edited) • Sales Calls

Hello everyone,

first of all i want to say thank you to coach

for the guidance and the invitation to acquire the habit of making cold call no matter what. Since from that channel till now i had 0 sales I got a ton of feedback and information about myself as well.

What 1,036 cold calls into dental practices actually produced. I need your read on this.

I started calling on August 17. Roughly 30 working days, weekends excluded. Here is the honest version, numbers first.

THE NUMBERS (measured by the dialer, not estimated)

1,036 dials

477 answered

64 owners reached

13 appointments set

3 no-shows

10 sales calls actually held

0 offers

~10 hours of real talk time

Median conversation: 56 seconds. Average: 78 seconds. The longest ran 12 minutes and 15 seconds, with a dentist who had no reason to give me that time.

That "0 offers" line is the one that matters. I work on the principle that the prospect should ask for the offer, not receive it. In 30 days exactly one person asked. He then no-showed the call where we were supposed to discuss it.

MOTIVATION AND TONE

The best thing here is not a metric. I showed up on days when I had zero desire to and zero short-term results to point at. It turned into a strange kind of comfort. I am reporting this because emotional state during the call is part of the equation, not a footnote.

THE SCRIPT

My first calls followed a fairly robotic script. It sounded suspicious on the other end, and it cost me lightness and momentum. 1,036 calls and 477 conversations is not a statistically solid sample, so treat this as an observation and not a finding: tone, vocal posture and social intelligence travel through the phone better than the words do.

OBJECTION HANDLING

This is the part I neglected, specifically the first 60 seconds of a cold conversation. I chose to show up as an expert who wants to help the business, rather than as someone selling with NLP tricks. I still think that choice was right. I also think it let me skip the actual work of handling the first objection.

THE OFFER

My product handles missed calls with an AI voice agent that convert in new appointments when nobody can answer. Across these conversations, missed calls and potential missed patients were not a real pain and not a perceived one.

The average practice I spoke to takes around 30 calls a day, has call forwarding and voicemail, and does not know its own missed call number. You cannot feel a loss you never measure. Several owners told me directly that after-hours calls were not a problem, and receptionists are generally willing to stay reachable on weekends.

What did open doors: anything aimed at more patients, more traffic, more people in the chair. The receptiveness was visibly different.

WHAT I DID WELL

Showed up every single day to do one of the most unpleasant things in business. Got 10 strangers to listen to me for an average of 45 minutes. Qualified them properly during the call, to the point of disqualifying them.

WHAT I DID BADLY

Follow-up. People handed me information and I did not chase it. I could have collected far more, and I should have been building a database from call one.

REFLECTION

Dentists are busy and hammered with calls, and I still got 13 sales appointments out of it (with 3 no show) Some of them stayed on the phone with me for over ten minutes. Time and attention are the most valuable currency a professional has, and it was given voluntarily. The channel produces attention.

WHERE I AM NOW

Cold calling works as an acquisition channel. I am much less sure about the fit between this specific offer, missed call handling, and this specific niche.

So here is the question I cannot answer on my own: do I keep the channel and point it at a different niche, or is the problem the offer itself?

Please let me know your toughts.

Grazie!!!🙏

1 comment

30 days cold call challenge retrospective