The Cold Calling Guide.

What this guide is.

Cold calling UK businesses is lawful, and it still books meetings that no other channel reaches. It works when three things line up: the right businesses to call, a caller who asks questions rather than reads at people, and enough calls a week to let the numbers behave. It wastes money when any one of them is missing.

The rules come down to less than most people fear: check the number against the right do-not-call register before you dial, say who you are and on whose behalf, and honour it permanently when a business asks you to stop. The register that applies depends on who answers: sole traders sit on the personal register, companies on the corporate one. The duty sits with whoever makes the call or has it made, and the fines in this industry go to callers who could not evidence their screening.

The rest of this guide runs in the order the work actually happens: the rules in full, the decision and your ICP, then the preparation: one pack your rep works from, with the shape of the call and the script inside it. Then hiring the person who dials, and running the campaign week by week.

One scope note before anything else: this is a business-to-business guide. Selling to consumers is a different discipline under different rules, and this guide is not written for it.

The UK rules on cold calling businesses

Which register applies

This is the distinction most people get wrong, and getting it wrong in the wrong direction is expensive.

Scotland differs because Scottish partnerships have legal personality of their own, which puts them on the corporate side of the line while an otherwise identical partnership in England sits on the individual side. Both registers are administered through the TPS service, and the rules themselves sit in the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations.

The regulator's own position is that if you cannot establish which it is, treat the details as belonging to an individual subscriber. That is the cautious side, and it is the side to be on.

Everything set out so far concerns live calls, meaning a person dialling and speaking. Automated or pre recorded calls are a different matter entirely and require consent regardless of who is being rung, which is why no serious business to business campaign uses them.

The two twenty-eight days

Twenty eight days appears twice in this area and the two are routinely conflated, including by suppliers who ought to know better.

• A statutory defence. Where a number has been on the register for fewer than twenty eight days, that is available as a defence, because a registration takes up to twenty eight days to become active.
• Guidance on frequency. A working set of numbers should be re screened at least every twenty eight days.

Neither is a licence to call for twenty eight days. If a supplier tells you that you may rely on their screening for four weeks, they are asserting an entitlement on your behalf that is not theirs to grant.

The screening obligation binds whoever makes or instigates the call. It does not bind a data supplier at all. A supplier can tell you the date they screened. Only you can decide whether it is still current enough to dial on. The regulator says the same about supplied data generally, in its guidance for organisations using data brokers: accepting assurances is not enough, you have to be able to demonstrate it.

Which is why the date matters more than the tick. A screening establishes the position on the day it ran and no further, and a supplier who will not tell you the date has given you a clock you cannot read.

The written assessment

Holding business contact details in order to ring them needs a lawful basis, and in practice that basis is legitimate interests. Direct marketing is not among the statutory recognised legitimate interests, so it does not get a shortcut. It qualifies under the ordinary test, and the ordinary test has to be worked through and recorded. The regulator’s direct marketing guidance sets the same test out in full.

Three parts. It takes about an hour and fits on a page.

• Purpose. What you are trying to achieve, named specifically rather than described in general terms.
• Necessity. Why a telephone call is a reasonable way to achieve it. This part has to consider and reject a less intrusive alternative. A necessity section that never mentions one is not a necessity section.
• Balance. Why the interests and rights of the people concerned do not override yours.

The part that is genuinely difficult

Reasonable expectation is normally anchored in an existing relationship, and in cold outbound there is none. Pretending otherwise is the commonest weakness in a commercial assessment.

What carries the balance instead is relevance: a specific, recorded reason why these particular businesses suit this particular purpose. Not a category, and not a hope. A sentence you wrote before you called them and can produce afterwards.

An assessment that names its own weak point and explains what carries the balance instead reads as examined. One that does not reads as unexamined, and the gap gets found anyway.

Sign it, date it, and file it with your screening records. Do it again when the audience, the area, the source or the method changes. And do not backdate it: where an assessment postdates the activity it covers, say so on its face.

The duty to tell people

The least understood duty in this area, and the one where the exposure actually is.

Where personal data did not come from the person it concerns, there is a duty to tell them: who you are, what you are doing with it, on what basis, what categories you hold, who else receives it, how long you keep it, what rights they have, and where you got it.

The timing has three limbs and the earliest one fires: within a month, or at first communication, or when the data is first disclosed to somebody else.

The exemption, and what it costs to use

There is a provision for cases where telling everybody would involve disproportionate effort. It is narrow, it is treated as an exception rather than a norm, and cost alone has been rejected as an answer.

It also carries a condition rather than a balance: anybody relying on it must take appropriate measures, including making the information available publicly. Without a published notice you are in breach of the ordinary duty and unable to rely on the exemption either.

Publish the notice, and let search engines index it. A notice that exists but cannot be found is arguably buried rather than published, and the fix costs nothing.

Objections: suppress, never delete

Somebody asking not to be contacted again is the one instruction that never expires. Honour it immediately, record it the same day, and keep it.

Keeping it is the part people get wrong. The regulator's own worked example of a breach runs like this: a business asks not to be called, the company deletes the number, later buys a screened set of data containing it, and calls again.

Deleting the record destroyed the only thing that would have prevented the second call.

A suppression record is not held for marketing purposes, so it is not caught by the same reasoning as the rest of your data, and there is no automatic right to have it removed. It exists precisely so you can leave somebody alone.

If somebody objects during one of your calls, the objection should also go back to whoever supplied the data, so the same business does not reappear on a future set.

The question that decides everything

Every business fined in this area failed the same question, and it is worth knowing what it is before anybody asks you.

Where did this data come from, and when was it screened?

Recent enforcement in telephone marketing has repeatedly turned on exactly that: callers who could not evidence screening, or who bought data without establishing whether it had been screened at all. Not on the calls being unreasonable, and not on the proposition being wrong.

So keep four things, and keep them in a form you could hand over calmly.

• Your assessment, dated and signed.
• Where each set of data came from, and when.
• Every screening result and the date it ran.
• Every objection, with the date received and the date applied. Permanently.

Also worth knowing: from June 2026 there is a duty to provide a route for complaints about how you handle personal data, including an electronic one, and to acknowledge a complaint within thirty days.

And the penalties for the marketing rules specifically were raised substantially, with effect from early 2026, from a half million pound ceiling to figures in the same bracket as data protection fines. The base rate of enforcement remains low, but what converts a complaint into action is a pattern of them, or being unable to answer the first question a regulator asks: where did this number come from, and what was that business told about how its details would be used?

Eight rules for the caller

One page. Put it in front of them on day one and it will save a difficult conversation later. These are conditions of doing the work rather than preferences, and they apply whether somebody is employed or engaged as a freelancer.

• Identify yourself and the business at the start of every call. Whether asked or not.
• State the reason for the call honestly and plainly.
• Respect a no the first time. No argument and no second attempt on the same call.
• Action any removal request at once, and record it the same day.
• Do not call numbers registered on a preference register without lawful grounds.
• Never mislead about who you are, why you are calling, or an existing relationship that does not exist.
• Record only the business details needed to arrange the meeting.
• Send no marketing email. The owner corresponds personally.

None of these make somebody less effective on the phone. Experienced callers do all eight already, and anybody who objects to them has told you something useful.

Is cold calling right for your business?

The honest answer comes down to you more than to the channel: a freelance rep works the phones, you take what they book, and whether it is right for your business is whether your half of that bargain is in place. Six questions decide it, on paper, before any money moves: who you sell to, what the rep books, what you bring to it, whether any data can reach the people you named, what counts as a booking, and what is realistic to expect. This part takes them in order, and everything later in the guide is framed by the answers.

Your ICP: who you sell to

Your ICP, short for ideal customer profile, is simply who you are going to sell your product to, and that is based on who you have sold to previously. If you have a specific ICP already, great. If you do not, look at who you have sold to before, because you can support this with case studies, and the reps can support it with case studies when they are on the phone. It gives your reps the tools to build trust: the businesses they are speaking to hear them name-drop someone you have worked with in their industry. This is very powerful.

When you are figuring out the ICP, always go for two. Have a main one and a secondary one, just in case the first does not work.

And if no ICP can be found even from your past sales, stop here, because everything downstream is built on it.

What the rep books

Next, what does a booked call actually produce? Are you selling to businesses local to you, with the rep booking meetings you attend in person to close, so location matters and the ground is somewhere you would genuinely drive to? Are they booking demos, where you sell software you can show over Zoom or Google Meet, so location stops mattering? Are they simply booking a call for you to take? Or are they doing the full sales cycle themselves, selling and closing the deal on the phone rather than booking it for you?

Typically, in this day and age, it is demo booking or meeting booking: the rep introduces the business, using the script you will see later on, and books a meeting for you to have with the prospect. Decide which yours is now and write it down, because the brief, the script and the summary form, all covered in Part 03, are framed towards it.

Your half of the bargain

Whichever you choose, be realistic about what freelance money buys. It buys an appointment setter or a demo booker, which is exactly why this guide is themed around those; it does not buy an experienced account executive who runs deals end to end. That person earns eighty grand a year and does not appear for three hundred pounds a month. And nobody hands a freelancer no data, no leads and no support, pays six hundred pounds a month, and gets results. It does not work like that.

So the rep opens the door, and walking through it is yours: the meetings, the demos, the phone calls, the driving where it happens in person. You need to be comfortable closing, or at least carrying real product knowledge while your own selling improves, so the opportunities they book are not wasted at your end. If that half is not in place, this channel is not right for you yet.

The data underneath

You can have the best rep in the world; if the data they are dialling is poor, they will not out-sell it, and they will not book anything worth taking. So part of the decision is whether a source of data exists that can physically reach the ICP you just named: the kind of business, the size, the ground you chose. If it does not, this does not work either. Good data does not make a campaign on its own, but bad data unmakes everything else in this guide.

The ICP you wrote down is also the brief for whoever supplies your calling data; ours is collected to it exactly.

Who qualifies

The rules that decide whether a conversation becomes a booking. Written down, because otherwise the standard drifts by week three and your diary fills with people who were never going to buy.

Four things established on every call before it counts as a booking.

• They are the decision maker, or the decision maker will be in the meeting
• They expressed clear interest, rather than politeness
• The money is workable, established gently rather than interrogated
• They will attend or reschedule rather than simply vanish

Add anything specific to your market. A minimum size, a licence they need to hold, an area you cover. Write those down too or they will be guessed at.

A bad meeting costs you more than an empty slot. Somebody measured on bookings alone will fill your week to hit a number, and each poor fit costs an hour, your patience, and eventually your faith in the whole exercise.

What is realistic

Judge this in calling hours, not weeks. Weeks are a useless unit when somebody works a few hours across three days, and guessing at the total in week three is how a fair judgement becomes an unfair one.

• First five calling hours. Expect very little, and say so out loud to whoever is doing it, or they will assume they are failing. They are learning your business, your market, the way gatekeepers, the receptionists whose job includes filtering calls like these, answer the phone, and the rhythm of the calling.
• Around ten hours. Positive signals. Longer conversations, real interest, callbacks being asked for, possibly a first booking.
• From fifteen hours. Bookings, at the latest. That is the latest acceptable point rather than the target.
• Week three. The week to act on what you are seeing. Not week one, and not week six.

It gets better after that, not before

Expect the meetings booked in month two to be noticeably better than the ones booked in week two, and expect that to happen without you doing anything except leaving a decent caller alone to get good. Early bookings are often the weakest, because a new caller books anybody who is polite.

The commonest mistake in month one is changing three things after a bad week. Change one, wait a week, and you will actually learn something. Change three and you have learned only that the numbers moved.

Preparation: what you have ready before the rep dials

Everything in this part is prepared once, before anyone dials, and handed to your rep as one pack: their training documents, otherwise known as a playbook. A document they can just read and know what they are doing. You make it once, and you reuse it with every new rep; freelance reps churn, and the playbook does the heavy lifting on the training every time.

In your rep’s eyes it is three things. Education: what you sell, said simply, and who buys it. Industry knowledge, enough to sound at home in the world they are ringing into. And a script, with the ideal flow of a call. Around those sit the working parts: the objections and their answers, the KPIs, meaning the targets the rep is measured on, the booking procedure, and the summary form, the one page write up your rep completes after every booking. This part covers each in turn. And one thread runs through all of it: everything is need orientated, because the prospect only ever cares about one thing, what is in it for them.

The education: your business, from a standing start

It starts as one page and six questions. Everything else comes out of that page, so it is worth an hour rather than ten minutes.

• What do you sell, in one sentence a stranger would understand? No industry words. If your neighbour would not follow it, it is not finished. This sentence gets said on every call.
• Who buys it, and roughly how big are they? The kind of business, the size, and anything that reliably means they are worth ringing.
• Which towns, and how far out? If your meetings happen in person, somewhere you would genuinely drive to. If the rep books demos or calls, distance matters less and this is simply the ground you choose to work.
• What is being booked, exactly? A demo, a meeting, an in person visit or a call you take: they run differently, so name which yours is, in the terms you chose in Part 02. Then what happens in it, how long it lasts, who runs it, and what the other person walks away with. “A chat about your marketing” gets forgotten by Thursday. “Twenty minutes with Mark, who will look at how you are quoting now and tell you where the time is going” does not.
• What makes somebody not worth booking? Be honest about it. Your rep needs written permission to let people go.
• Who runs the demo or meeting, and when are they actually free? A name, and real slots. A booking with nobody to run it is not a booking.

Then say it simply

Behind that page goes a short explainer of what you do. The test is that a curious teenager could read it and understand your business, because the person reading it has never worked in your industry and is about to describe it to people who have. Four things: what the thing is, plainly, assuming nothing; how the work actually happens, in four steps; what the customer ends up with, in their words rather than yours; and five industry terms, decoded. That last one stops a rep freezing when a prospect says something they have never heard, which happens on roughly the fourth call of every campaign.

And say where you sit

Finish with how you sit against the alternative, which is usually not a competitor: it is doing it themselves, doing nothing, or an arrangement they inherited years ago. What most of them do now; what is wrong with that, said without sneering at anybody; what you do differently, in one line; and who you are genuinely not right for. That last one earns its place: a rep who can say “honestly, if you are already doing that, we are probably not for you” gains more credibility in five seconds than everything else combined.

Industry knowledge

The second thing in the pack is the world of the person being called. Your rep is about to ring two hundred letting agents, or roofers, or care home managers, and has never been one. This is what lets them sound like somebody who understands that world, and a rep will naturally learn more the longer they are on the phone to the industry; the pack’s job is the head start.

Four short sections: a day in their life, written as prose, what interrupts them, what a bad Tuesday looks like; what they care about, four things, plainly; what keeps them up at night, four things, honest rather than flattering; and five phrases they use, decoded.

One rule: your product must not appear anywhere on it. The moment it does, it stops being about them and turns into a second sales sheet. Kept clean, it is also the document that outlives everything else: the script gets rewritten, the price changes, and this one stays true for years.

The script, and the ideal call flow

A script is a guideline. Most reps will not use one word for word, or they will lean on it early to get familiar with the industry and what they are saying, and then naturally pivot into their own version of it. That is fine if it works. If it is not working, the rule is simple: back to the script.

The flow underneath it is what does not change: earn the right to make an offer, steps one to four. Make the offer and check it is worth anybody’s time, five and six. Lock it in, seven to thirteen. The wording below is a sample that has worked for fifteen years, across appointment booking, meeting booking and demo booking, because it sells time rather than the product. As written it books the demo or meeting you chose in Part 02; a session or a call you take uses the same shape, with only the offer at step five reworded.

The objections

Almost every objection is one of three things underneath: they are busy, they do not believe it applies to them, or they have been burned before. Working out which one you are hearing matters more than any clever response.

• Send me an email. Nearly always a polite exit. It belongs on the phone. Where it is genuine, the details go to the owner who writes it personally.
• We already have someone. Fine. The question is whether that arrangement is working, not whether it exists.
• Not interested. In what? They have not heard anything yet. This one is reflex rather than judgement and usually arrives before you have said what you do.
• No budget. Sometimes true. More often a proxy for not yet convinced it is worth budgeting for.
• Call me back in six months. Occasionally genuine. Usually a softer no, and worth testing gently rather than accepting on the spot.
• How did you get my number. Answer straight and briefly. Evasion loses the call and deserves to.
• I am not the right person. The most useful objection there is, provided the caller asks who is.
• We tried that before. The best opening of the eight. Ask what happened.

Write your own answers to all eight before anybody starts. Not word for word scripts, but the substance: what is actually true in your business. People improvise around substance perfectly well, and improvising around something true works.

The KPIs

Set them before the first dial, and set them in writing: clear goals, a clear target, a set time frame. Calls a day, real conversations, bookings a week. How to read those numbers once they arrive is Part 05.

Keep pay and targets out of the shared pack. They are between you and the rep, confirmed by email before the first call, so both sides hold the same numbers in writing.

The booking procedure, and the summary form

Two pieces of machinery, both built before the first dial, and they decide most of your show up rate.

The booking procedure

Bookings go through your own booking link, Calendly or any of its rivals, set up once: the length set to exactly what the rep promises on the phone, buffer either side, instant confirmation and reminders switched on (the full reminder ladder is in Part 05), guests allowed, the video link attached automatically, and a mobile number captured as well as an email address. On the call, the rep fills the form in on the prospect’s behalf, offers two specific times rather than “when are you free”, stays on the line until the invite has arrived, and leaves no notes on the booking page. Then book a slot yourself from a different email address and look at what actually arrives; most people have never done this and are surprised by what they find.

The rep owns the booking until it happens: the confirmation, the reminder call, and any rebooking. And what counts as a booking is the four ticks from Part 02, established on the call, because a diary entry is not a booking.

The summary form

One form per booking, filled in immediately after the call, while the conversation is still in the rep’s head. The call exists to surface one need; the demo or meeting exists to show how that need gets met, and the form is what carries it between the two. Its test is simple: could whoever runs the demo or meeting run it from this form alone, opening on what the prospect actually cares about, without asking a single thing they already explained?

• The booking. Date, time, and whether it is a demo, a meeting or a call.
• Who. Business name, contact name, website, email, phone.
• Qualified. Four ticks: decision maker, clear interest, workable budget, will attend.
• Their situation, and what they want. How the work happens today, what is not working, the result they are after, and any urgency.
• Intent, timeframe, money. High, medium or low; how soon; how the money line landed.
• Personality. Direct, cautious, chatty, sceptical. It changes how the meeting opens, and it is the field people end up most grateful for.

Any free form tool builds it in ten minutes: responses linked to a spreadsheet, notify on new response switched on, every important field required. A booking without a completed form is not a booking; say it in week one and you never say it again.

The working setup

Four unglamorous things. Skipping any of them shows up in week two as a problem that looks like something else.

• A phone the rep can use all day. Mobile is fine and is the norm. What matters is that it is theirs and it is consistent, so callbacks reach the right person.
• A rule that no marketing email ever goes out. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, “send me something” is an objection rather than a request, and it belongs on the phone. Never give a rep something to send: it becomes an escape hatch from difficult calls, and within a fortnight every awkward conversation ends with an email nobody reads.
• A decision about who runs the demo or meeting. Usually you, because the rep sells time with the expert and you are the expert. If it is somebody else, their name is the one used on the phone, their diary is the one booked, and their inbox is where the summary form lands.
• Your own facts, checked. The rep will repeat a handful of facts about your business hundreds of times to people who buy for a living. How long you have traded, who you have worked with, what it costs. If one of them is wrong, it is wrong hundreds of times before anybody notices. Read them out loud before the first dial.

How to hire a freelance cold caller

Where they are

Not on the general job boards in any useful number, because the good ones are rarely looking.

• Freelance platforms. The strongest route for UK phone work. Expect volume and a low hit rate.
• The big job sites. Better than people expect, because plenty of experienced callers want ongoing part time hours from home rather than a contract.
• Facebook groups for freelance sales and telemarketing. Unfashionable and genuinely effective. A lot of the experienced UK ones are there.
• Word of mouth. The best route by a distance. Ask anybody who has run outbound before.

Post in more than one place, because the good ones are not all sitting on the same site. And expect a few to drop out between applying and starting. That is normal rather than a reflection on you.

What rarely works: general recruiters, and anybody describing themselves as a lead generation agency, because you will be buying their process rather than a person.

The advert

The advert is guidance rather than a template to paste, because the tone of it filters who applies. Write it in your own words. What matters is that it contains four things and asks for one.

• Name the market being called. Not "B2B". The actual kind of business.
• Name the hours honestly, including that they spread across at least three days a week.
• Name the trial. Twenty paid calling hours before anything longer is agreed, so nobody arrives surprised by it.
• Say who they would be working with, and that they are opening doors rather than closing.

A voice recording with the application. No recording, no interview. You are hiring a voice, and a CV cannot tell you whether a busy owner would stay on the phone with them for ninety seconds.

Ask one filtering question in the body as well: tell me about a campaign that went well and one that did not. Anybody who cannot answer it has not done this work.

CVs, and fit

With reps, the CV does not mean anything. Some of the worst salespeople carry the best CVs, and vice versa. The only evidence that counts is how they sound on a real call, which is what the interview below is built to hear.

Not every rep is suitable for every industry. Someone with a chatty-lad type personality will do well selling your services to plumbers and tradespeople, but will not land the same with accountants. An older, more serious professional will land in finance, and not as well with the trades side. So just because a rep seems to be doing badly, it may be the pairing rather than the person: be selective about who you choose for which campaign, and when you interview, listen with your sector’s ear.

And a B2B seller is completely different from a B2C seller: different skill sets. Ask for business-to-business experience specifically.

Two phone calls, never video

Never in person, never on video, and never a role play. You are hiring somebody to be effective on a telephone, so assess them on a telephone. A nervous person on a pretend call is not the same person as a relaxed one on a real call, and you will not know what to listen for anyway.

Call one, before anything else

Fifteen minutes, and largely a judgement call. Are they easy to talk to, do they feel friendly, are you comfortable listening to them? You will know inside five minutes and you should trust that.

Then send them your briefing documents and tell them to study them.

Call two, after they have read them

Twenty minutes. Quiz them on the business and the market. It shows you how much they have grasped and, just as usefully, whether they bothered to read anything at all.

That second call is doing quiet work. Somebody who could not be bothered to open the documents has put themselves in a bracket without you having to make a decision, and you have saved twenty hours of training.

Whether they ask you a question in the first thirty seconds, and whether they stop talking afterwards. Nothing else on that call matters nearly as much.

Two other things worth knowing before you start. Do not expect video calls, at all, because these are phone people. And never recruit on messages alone.

The trial

The unit is twenty calling hours, not a fixed fortnight. How it splits is agreed between you: an hour a day for a month, or two hours a day for two weeks, both work.

Whatever the split, the hours spread across a minimum of three days a week. Somebody calling one day a week never builds rhythm and never gets good at your proposition.

• Paid at the full rate, and most will ask for some of it up front, which is fair when there is no relationship yet. Half at the start and half at the end is the even answer.
• Do not hand over everything on day one. Twenty businesses is a trial. The rest can wait until you know.
• After a good trial, one month rolling. Never a long contract, in either direction.

What you are actually measuring

Not whether they booked. Whether they came back with a clean, unembarrassed record of a hard week, and whether they improved between hour five and hour twenty.

Listen to three or four calls before the end. Not to catch anybody out, but because you will learn more about your own proposition from four recordings than from a month of thinking about it.

What to pay

An hourly rate with something on results. The mix matters far more than the number.

Pure commission attracts people who will book anybody to get paid, and produces a diary of poor fits. Pure hourly with no upside attracts people content to be paid for dialling. Somewhere in between, weighted so the hourly rate is genuinely liveable, gets you somebody who cares whether the meetings are any good.

• Pay per meeting that happened and was worth having, never per meeting booked
• Agree what counts before they start: the four ticks from Part 02, in writing
• After the trial, pay against a monthly invoice

Pay the invoice the day it arrives. Every time, without exception. Freelancers talk to each other and reliable payers keep the good ones, which makes this the cheapest loyalty you will ever buy.

The numbers decide

Naturally, reps are salespeople, so you will get on well with them. Because they are freelance and self-employed, they are very highly incentivised to sell themselves to you, because ultimately you are paying their bills next month. Do not let your personal opinion of a rep cloud your judgment.

The KPIs you set in Part 03 are the judge. If they are not hit, move on to the next person. That is the luxury of the playbook you created and spent the time on, and that is the luxury of working with freelance salespeople rather than employing someone, being stuck with them and having to train them. It protects you from being stuck with a bad rep for a long period.

So lose your personal feelings towards them. They might be a great guy, they might be a great girl, but if the results are not being hit, you are losing money. Get rid, and move on to the next one. It is always good to have two running side by side if you can; if not, just do not get attached, or sold to.

Keeping them

Morale is the single most important thing you manage here, and it is not a soft point. Salespeople are fickle and negativity damages performance faster than anything else you can do. Somebody who believes they are doing well will do well.

Nitpicking sinks morale and takes results down with it. Most callers are severely self critical already. They know when they are underperforming and they do not need reminding.

• Praise publicly, steer gently, never nitpick.
• One short call a week, inside their working hours, positives first.
• One thing to work on, never three.
• If you have two callers, never compare them out loud.

The three things that make people leave

None of them are money.

• Nobody told them how it was going. Twenty minutes a week fixes this permanently.
• The meetings they booked were not taken seriously. Cancel two in a row and they will conclude the work does not matter, correctly.
• Constant correction. Most callers are hard enough on themselves already, and a weekly list of faults finishes off whatever confidence was left.

And if it genuinely is not working, you simply stop working together. That freedom cuts both ways and it is the entire advantage of hiring this way rather than employing somebody.

Running the campaign, week by week

Phones, CRMs and costs

Keep it cost effective. Because of the cost of caller IDs, numbers and software, the lean setup is this: get good data, in line with the rules earlier, and let the reps simply use their own CRM, the system where calls and outcomes get logged, which they will have, and their own phone number.

The caveat to this is that you cannot listen to the calls. So ensure you vet them properly, and truly trust that they will not misrepresent your business. That vetting is the interview and the trial in Part 04, and the summary form after every booking is what keeps you close to what is actually being said.

The four numbers

Four figures a week, per caller. That is the entire reporting burden, and anything more elaborate gets abandoned by March.

• Dials made · how much phone time really happened
• Real conversations had · how good the data and the timing are
• Meetings booked · how good the pitch is
• Meetings attended · how good the confirming is

Watching numbers beats watching people. You are not paying for hours sat on a phone, you are paying for conversations and bookings, and four figures show exactly that without anybody having to be supervised.

Ratios beat totals

Totals tell you how busy somebody was. Ratios tell you where to help.

• Conversations against dials judges the data and the calling hours
• Bookings against conversations judges the pitch
• Attended against booked judges the confirming

Compare somebody against themselves last week. Never against another caller, and never against a figure you read somewhere.

Call rates, read properly

Twenty calls an hour is a minimum if they are using their own SIM and working off a spreadsheet. If they are on a CRM you have provided, you can put things in like an auto-dialler, software that rings the next number automatically, to speed the volume up. Ultimately though, it depends on the length of the calls they are having.

• If someone makes twenty calls in an hour and they all go straight to answerphone, that is five minutes of calling in an hour. Nowhere near good enough.
• If they are making ten calls an hour but having five-minute conversations, that is good, potentially, if some of those are manifesting into bookings.
• If they are having ten five-minute calls, or two twenty-minute calls that just turn into chats where nothing is being solved, that is not good either.

Some reps will have a tendency to milk the conversation: they know thirty seconds in that they are not going to sell to someone, and they keep the call going to get their call time up. Be mindful of this.

Reading a bad week

Five things can be wrong and only one of them is the caller. Work down this in order, because the first row that matches is almost always the real answer.

The last row is the one people get wrong most often, and it is where the caller gets blamed for something that was never theirs.

Judge nothing in week one, because everybody is slow at hour three. Look for direction in week two rather than results. Act in week three. Somebody improving week on week is worth keeping even when the numbers are still low, and somebody flat for three weeks on good data will be flat on the next set too.

Getting them to turn up

Show up rate is its own lever and most people never touch it. The same data, the same caller and the same script produce completely different results depending purely on how many booked prospects arrive.

So treat booked, attended and engaged as three separate things you can improve rather than one number you hope for. A no show costs the same as a meeting and returns nothing, and it is fixable without a single extra dial.

The four reminders

Three are automatic and yours to set up once. The fourth is human and belongs to the caller, every time.

• Instant confirmation, automatic. Sent the second the booking is made, while the person is still on the phone. The caller waits until they confirm it has landed before hanging up.
• Twenty four hour email, automatic. Reconfirm date and time, two or three lines on what will be covered, and an easy reschedule link.
• One to two hour text, automatic. This catches the person who has not opened their inbox since lunch, which is most people. Worth the pennies.
• The reminder call, by hand. Ideally within twenty four hours of the meeting. If it falls on a day they do not work, it belongs on the closest working day before. Agree this up front and most callers do it happily.

Giving somebody an easy way to move a meeting reduces no shows rather than causing them. People who cannot move it simply do not turn up.

When somebody does not turn up

A single no show is normal rather than a signal. The caller chases and rebooks, the same day, while it is still live. Short and warm with no guilt in it, because the commonest cause is a genuinely forgotten diary rather than a change of heart. One rebook, and if that falls over too the record goes back to the warm pile, the not-right-now businesses you will ring again, rather than being chased a third time.

If no shows start clustering, look at the confirmation rather than the prospect. Booked too far ahead, a weak invite, or somebody who did not wait for the confirmation to land explain almost all of it. Several in a fortnight is a setup problem, not bad luck.

The meeting

Your part of the bargain. The caller has done their job the moment somebody attends, and from that point everything is yours.

Five minutes before

Read the form again. Write down their one need in their words, and one question you actually want answered. That is the whole preparation, and doing more of it is usually a way of avoiding the fact that you are about to have to listen.

The rule of the room: talk less than half the time. If you are explaining for more than a couple of minutes without asking anything, you have started presenting and they have started waiting.

The shape of it

Run it as the questions they naturally have, in the order they naturally have them. You are not presenting, you are answering, and the difference is audible.

• Why are we speaking? Restate the need the caller captured, in their words.
• Why should I trust you? Brief, relevant, then stop. Over explaining here reads as nerves.
• What is it, in plain English? The simplest version you can manage, grounded in something real.
• How does it work? Only the parts that touch the need they gave you.
• What would it look like for me? Success in their words, with a realistic number attached.
• Reflect and align. Say back the need, the capacity and the budget. Get a verbal yes before going near an offer.
• What am I committing to? Term, scope and price, clearly. They have already heard the price, so say it plainly and stop.
• Do we move forward? One clear question, then silence. The pause after the ask belongs to them.

Yes, move forward. Or no, not the right fit. Both are useful and both are honest. "I will think about it" is not a third, so ask which of the two it is.

Afterwards, write the follow up while you still remember the tone of the conversation and send it inside forty eight hours whatever the outcome. If they need time, book the follow up before you hang up rather than agreeing to chase. A date in a diary is worth ten promises to be in touch.

Working the ground

After five attempts with no answer, leave a message and park that business for a month before coming back to it. Parked, never deleted.

There is no magic calling window. The only reliable pattern worth knowing is that Monday mornings and Friday afternoons are poor. Everything else depends on the kind of business being called, which is one more reason for hours to spread across the week rather than landing in a single day.

A not right now is a good outcome rather than a failure. It is next month's warm call, and warm calls convert better than anything else you will ever do.

When you have worked through everybody

That is a finished job rather than a problem, but an idle caller is a lost caller. Line up the next area about a week before you need it, because somebody with nothing to dial finds another client, and that is the expensive way to learn this.

• The warm pile first. Everybody who said not right now. It costs nothing and they are already interested.
• Same kind of business, new area. Your pitch is already proven.
• Same area, refreshed. Businesses appear and details change, and a fresh collection catches them.
• A wider radius, if the first ring converted.

The first month

• Week one · setup, and no calls at all. The booking flow in one afternoon. Read your own briefing documents properly and check the facts. Post the advert. Open the diary and test the booking link yourself.
• Week two · hire and start the trial. Two calls with each candidate, pick one, agree terms in writing, and hand over twenty businesses rather than everything.
• Week three · the full data set, and the first real numbers. Expect a booking or two and at least one no show. Do not redesign anything yet.
• Week four · your first meetings. Run them properly every time, even when you think you already know the answer. Compare what the form told you with what you found in the room.

Two things go wrong with a first campaign and both are avoidable. Owners panic in week one because the phone has not rung, and drift in week four because nobody told them what happens next.

The commonest mistake in month one is changing three things after a bad week. Change one, wait a week, and you will actually learn something.

Glossary.