Key Takeaways
- Cold calling and cold emailing both work, but in different ways: recent data shows average cold-calling success around 2-3% of conversations turning into meetings, while average cold email reply rates sit near 5-8%, with top campaigns hitting 15-25%.
- Treat it as cold emailing AND cold calling, not versus: multichannel outbound (email + phone + LinkedIn) consistently outperforms single-channel by 2-5x in engagement and conversions, so your SDRs should be working coordinated sequences, not isolated touches.
- Buyer behavior has shifted: B2B buyers complete ~70-80% of their journey before talking to sales, and 60-70%+ say they prefer to be contacted via email for first touch, making email the logical entry channel and phone the best follow-up and deal-accelerator.
- Cold email wins on scale and cost: email outreach typically costs pennies per send and can deliver $36–$40+ in revenue for every $1 spent when done right, while cold calling is more expensive per touch but produces higher-quality discovery and faster qualification.
- Cold calling shines for high-intent and higher-ACV deals: top-performing teams still book 4-10% of live conversations into meetings, especially when reps call mobile numbers, time calls well, and reference relevant triggers or prior emails.
- The biggest performance gaps aren't channel-based, they're execution-based: hyper-targeted lists, strong ICP definition, tight messaging, and 4-7 follow-ups drive the difference between <1% and 10%+ response, regardless of channel.
- Bottom line: most B2B teams should lead with personalized cold email to warm the prospect, then use well-timed, researched calls to convert interest into meetings-measuring both channels on meetings booked and pipeline, not vanity metrics.
Cold Emailing vs Cold Calling Is a Resource Allocation Problem
Cold emailing vs cold calling isn’t a religious war—it’s a planning decision about how your team spends time to produce meetings and pipeline. In 2025, average cold-calling success sits around 2.3% of conversations converting into booked meetings, while cold email performance is typically higher on volume-based metrics like responses. The smartest teams don’t “pick a winner”; they design a system where email creates surface area and calls convert intent.
Benchmarks make the trade-off clear: cold email response rates average 8.5% across industries, but plenty of campaigns still live in the 1–5% range when targeting and deliverability are weak. Cold calls, on the other hand, generate fewer total “touches” per rep-hour, yet a real conversation can compress qualification into minutes. The question isn’t which channel works—it’s which channel works best for your ICP, your ACV, and your team capacity.
This matters even more because buyer preferences have shifted toward digital-first contact. A large share of decision-makers—roughly 60–71%—say they prefer email as an initial outreach channel, especially in the US. That doesn’t make the phone obsolete; it simply changes the sequence: lead with email to earn attention, then use calls to turn attention into a meeting.
Buyer Behavior Changed, So Your First Touch Should Too
Modern B2B prospects often self-educate long before they want a sales conversation. When buyers complete roughly 70–80% of their journey before talking to sales, your outbound message is rarely the start of their research—it’s an interruption or a shortcut. Your job is to be relevant enough to earn the next step without forcing the whole pitch into a first touch.
That’s why cold email has become the logical entry point for most outbound sales agency workflows. Email matches how people prefer to triage new information: asynchronously, on their schedule, with the ability to forward internally. It also gives you a clean way to “warm” accounts using micro-signals like opens, clicks, and page visits—then route higher-intent accounts to your cold calling team for real-time discovery.
The mistake we see most often is treating the channel choice as a philosophy instead of a funnel. When teams run email-only or phone-only, they force prospects to respond in one mode—and buyers simply don’t behave that way. A better approach is to design outreach around how decisions get made now: email for awareness and context, calls for momentum and qualification, and follow-up email for recap and nurturing when timing isn’t right.
A Practical Comparison: Scale, Cost, and Conversion
Email wins on scale and unit economics. Typical cold email open rates land around 15–28%, and strong programs can turn that visibility into consistent replies when the list and messaging are tight. Email marketing also has a well-known ROI profile—often cited around 40:1—which is why so many teams start with a cold email agency or in-house sequencing to cover more of their TAM quickly.
Calls win when you need certainty fast. Even with the 2025 average of 2.3% conversation-to-meeting conversion, a single good conversation can confirm fit, surface real objections, and accelerate next steps in a way email can’t. The operational catch is that connection is a grind: it takes roughly 3 call attempts on average to connect, so any “one dial per lead” approach is guaranteed to underperform.
Use benchmarks to calibrate expectations, then measure your own results on meetings and pipeline—not vanity metrics. The table below is a helpful starting point for what “normal” looks like before you tailor by segment, ACV, and data quality.
| Metric | Cold Email (Benchmarks) | Cold Calling (Benchmarks) |
|---|---|---|
| Preference for first touch | 60–71% prefer email | Lower preference, higher impact after engagement |
| Typical open/visibility | 15–28% opens | Connect rate varies; requires persistence |
| Average response / success | 8.5% average response rate | 2.3% of conversations become booked meetings |
| Effort to get an interaction | Follow-ups drive most replies | 3 attempts needed to connect on average |
| Economics (directional) | 40:1 revenue per $1 cited for email marketing | Higher labor cost per touch; higher info density per interaction |
The Winning Play: A Multichannel Cadence That Uses Both
If you want predictable pipeline, build a cadence where cold email and cold call services reinforce each other instead of competing. Research consistently points to the same conclusion: multichannel prospecting works better than single-channel. In fact, 75% of B2B companies report improved prospecting results when email is combined with other channels like phone and social.
A simple operating principle is “lead with email, close with the phone.” Email earns the right to call by putting your name and a relevant idea in front of the prospect, and the call then converts interest into a meeting when there’s even a hint of engagement. This is also where a strong SDR agency motion shines: sequences become repeatable, activity becomes measurable, and reps stop freelancing touch patterns that are impossible to coach.
Cadences should reflect buyer behavior, not rep convenience. Most teams quit after one or two attempts; top teams build 4–7 touches over two to three weeks and require completion before a lead is marked unresponsive. In practice, that means a tight first email, a relevant follow-up, a call referencing the email, another email with a proof point, and one or two more call/email touches based on segment and ACV.
Stop asking which channel is better and start asking which sequence produces the most meetings per rep-hour.
Cold Email Best Practices That Actually Lift Replies
Cold email is brutally competitive because it’s easy to send and hard to earn attention. If your open rates are below the typical 15–28% range, you don’t have a “copy problem” yet—you likely have a list, deliverability, or relevance problem. That’s why the best programs treat list building services and segmentation as a first-class growth lever, not an admin task.
The most expensive mistake is spray-and-pray sending to massive, untargeted lists. You might book a few meetings, but you’ll pay for it in domain reputation, inbox placement, and a burned TAM—especially if you run multiple brands or rely on email for customer communication. A tighter ICP, smaller batches, and role-specific messaging is how teams move from the “stuck” 1–5% world toward the 8.5% average and beyond.
Use triggers to make cold feel warm: hiring spikes, funding, tech stack changes, and content consumption are all fair game when you can cite them cleanly and quickly. At SalesHive, we’ve found that personalization works best when it’s structured—one relevant trigger, one credible proof point, one clear CTA—so reps don’t over-write. This is also why AI-assisted personalization (like our eMod workflows) can help a cold email agency program scale without drifting into generic “Hey {FirstName}” noise.
Cold Calling Best Practices for Higher-Quality Meetings
Cold calling isn’t dead in 2025, but lazy dialing is. The average success rate fell from 4.82% in 2024 to about 2.3% in 2025, which means randomness gets punished faster than ever. If you want b2b cold calling to work, you need tighter targeting, better data, and coaching that improves what happens in the first 20 seconds of the call.
The second biggest mistake is dialing without context. When reps read a generic script with no insight, prospects hang up, reps assume “calls don’t work,” and the team quietly abandons a channel that still converts—especially for higher-ACV segments. A simple fix is requiring 60–90 seconds of research per account (or persona cluster) and opening with one relevant observation that matches the prospect’s world.
Operationally, persistence is non-negotiable: it takes about 3 call attempts on average just to connect, and that’s before you even evaluate the quality of your opener or offer. That’s why many companies lean on a cold calling agency or outsourced sales team for consistency—dialing volume, follow-up discipline, and call coaching are hard to sustain when your internal team is also running demos and managing opportunities. If you’re evaluating b2b cold calling services or cold calling USA providers, prioritize data quality and training systems over flashy promises.
How to Measure Email vs Phone Without Fooling Yourself
To compare channels fairly, normalize output and focus on outcomes. Open rates and connect rates are directional, but they don’t pay the bills; meetings booked and qualified pipeline do. Track “meetings per 100 dials” and “meetings per 1,000 emails,” then tie those meetings to downstream metrics like show rate, opportunity creation, and win rate to see whether calls or email produce better-fit deals.
Avoid snap judgments from tiny samples. When a team sends a few hundred emails and makes a few dozen calls, the variance is so high that any conclusion is basically a coin flip. Run properly sized tests over 60–90 days, with enough volume across multiple reps, and keep your cadence consistent so you’re measuring channel impact—not randomness or rep behavior.
Coaching is where the largest gains hide. Review call recordings and email reply threads weekly, identify patterns (where objections show up, which CTAs earn replies, which subject lines lift opens), and turn them into micro-skills reps practice. This is one reason sales outsourcing can be effective: a specialized sales development agency can deliver process rigor, testing discipline, and coaching loops that most in-house teams struggle to maintain while they’re also closing revenue.
What to Do Next: Pick a Mix by Segment, ACV, and Capacity
Let deal size dictate channel investment. For lower-ACV or high-volume offers, lead with email because it scales and keeps cost per touch low; then reserve calls for hand-raisers and your highest-fit accounts. For enterprise or complex deals, invest earlier in phone and LinkedIn touches, using email as context and “air cover” that makes calls feel less random and more relevant.
If you’re resource-constrained, don’t default to choosing one channel—default to building a simple, enforceable system. Start by auditing the last 90 days and re-expressing results as meetings per rep-hour, then define a standard cadence for your top ICP so every SDR runs the same play. From there, tighten your data inputs (especially direct dials and verified emails), because list quality is often the hidden variable behind “email is dead” or “cold calling doesn’t work.”
When it’s time to scale, decide what to keep in-house versus outsource sales execution. Many teams keep late-stage selling internal and partner for top-of-funnel: an outsourced sales team can handle list building, sequencing, and dialing while your AEs stay focused on discovery depth and closing. At SalesHive, we’ve been running this blended model since 2016—across email, phone, and list building—and we’ve booked 100,000+ meetings for 1,500+ B2B clients by treating “cold email vs cold call” as an integrated outbound engine, not a debate.
Sources
- Cognism – Cold Calling Success Rates 2025
- Cognism – State of Cold Calling 2024
- Artemis – Cold Email Response Rate Benchmarks 2025
- Zipdo – Cold Email Statistics 2025
- Hunter – The State of Cold Email 2025
- SalesSo – Cold Email Statistics 2025
- Cognism – 45+ B2B Cold Calling Statistics 2025
- Sopro – State of Prospecting 2024
📊 Key Statistics
Expert Insights
Lead With Email, Close With the Phone
Use cold email as your low-friction first touch to get on the prospect's radar, then pivot to phone once there's even a hint of engagement-opens, clicks, or web visits. This mirrors buyer preferences for digital-first contact while still leveraging the phone where it shines: live discovery and objection handling.
Let Deal Size Dictate Channel Investment
For low-ACV or high-volume offers, make email and automation do the heavy lifting and reserve calls for hand-raisers or top-tier accounts. For enterprise or complex deals, expect to invest more SDR time on the phone early, using email as context and air cover rather than your primary driver.
Measure Channels on Meetings, Not Vanity Metrics
Open rates and connect rates are directional, but what matters is meetings and qualified pipeline per rep-hour. Track metrics like 'meetings per 100 emails' and 'meetings per 100 dials' so you can compare email vs. phone on equal footing and reallocate time based on actual yield.
Design Cadences Around Buyer Behavior, Not Rep Convenience
Most replies and conversations happen after multiple touches, yet most reps quit after one or two. Build sequences that reflect reality—4-7 touches across email and phone over 2-3 weeks-and enforce completion before a lead is marked 'unresponsive' or goes back to marketing.
Use Data and Triggers to Make Cold Feel Warm
Whether you're emailing or calling, reference real triggers-funding, hiring sprees, tech stack changes, or content consumption. Trigger-based messaging can dramatically lift both call conversion and email reply rates, and it's exactly where AI-powered intent tools and good list building pay off.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Treating cold email and cold calling as an either/or decision
This forces your team into a single-channel box and ignores the fact that most buyers respond only after multiple touches across different channels, not one perfect email or one perfect call.
Instead: Design standard multichannel cadences where email and phone support each other-email to warm up, phone to convert, then back to email for nurturing if timing isn't right.
Spray-and-pray cold emailing to massive untargeted lists
You end up with low reply rates, domain reputation issues, and a burned TAM; you might book a few meetings, but you destroy long-term deliverability and credibility.
Instead: Spend more time on ICP and list quality than on copy; build smaller, tightly segmented lists and personalize around role, industry, and trigger events so your 1-2% reply rate jumps closer to 8-15%.
Dialing without context or preparation
Generic, scripted calls lead to fast hang-ups and reinforce the idea that cold calling is annoying and low-yield, which in turn kills rep morale.
Instead: Require 60-90 seconds of research per target account or persona cluster and arm SDRs with 1-2 relevant insights or questions they can drop in the first 20 seconds of the call.
Judging channels on the wrong metrics or too small a sample
Teams call 30 people in a week, send 200 emails, and then announce 'cold calling doesn't work' or 'email is dead,' which is just noise statistically.
Instead: Run properly sized tests-thousands of emails and hundreds or thousands of dials across multiple reps over at least a few weeks-and evaluate on meetings booked, not just raw replies or conversations.
Not adjusting channel mix by segment or buying stage
Using the same 80/20 email/phone split for SMB and enterprise, or for net-new vs. open opportunities, ignores how different buyers want to engage and leaves pipeline on the table.
Instead: Define clear rules of engagement by segment (e.g., enterprise = more phone and LinkedIn; SMB = more email and automation) and by stage (e.g., calls for active evaluations, email-heavy for early education).
Action Items
Audit the last 90 days of outbound performance by channel
Pull data on emails sent, calls made, connects, replies, meetings booked, and pipeline generated. Normalize it to 'per 100 emails' and 'per 100 dials' so you can see which channel is truly producing more meetings for your ICP.
Define a standard multichannel cadence for your top ICP
Build a 10-14 day sequence blending 4-6 emails and 2-4 calls, plus optional LinkedIn touches, and roll it out as the default for SDRs instead of letting everyone freestyle their own reach-outs.
Tighten your ICP and list-building process
Document firmographic, technographic, and trigger criteria for 'good fit' accounts, then adjust your data providers and enrichment tools so every email and phone number your SDRs touch is high-probability, not just high-volume.
Upgrade call and email coaching
Review call recordings and reply threads weekly to spot patterns, refine openers, and improve objection handling. Pair new SDRs with top performers and give them specific micro-skills to practice for each channel.
Set channel-specific KPIs tied to meetings and pipeline
For example, target 1 meeting per 40-60 dials and 1 meeting per 200-400 cold emails, then iterate. Use these guardrails to decide if you should shift more SDR time toward phone, email, or a partner like SalesHive.
Decide what to outsource vs. keep in-house
If your core team is better at running deals than generating them, consider outsourcing cold calling, cold email, and list building to a specialist while your AEs focus on late-stage conversations and closing.
Partner with SalesHive
SalesHive’s SDR outsourcing model lets you plug in US-based or Philippines-based SDR teams who live in the trenches of cold outreach every day. On the email side, their AI-powered tools like eMod personalize messaging at scale, pulling in role, industry, and trigger-based insights so your campaigns land above the noise instead of in the spam folder. On the phone side, SalesHive’s cold calling teams use proven scripts, intent data, and mobile-first dialing strategies to turn more conversations into booked meetings.
Because there are no annual contracts and onboarding is designed to be low-risk, you can test a fully integrated cold email + cold calling program without overcommitting headcount or budget. If you want a partner that knows how to make email and phone work together-not fight each other-SalesHive is built for exactly that.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
Which is more effective for B2B lead generation: cold emailing or cold calling?
Effectiveness depends on how you define it. On a per-touch basis, cold calls can have higher meeting conversion from conversations-recent benchmarks put cold-calling success around 2-3% of conversations booked into meetings. Cold email, meanwhile, reaches far more prospects at much lower cost, with average reply rates around 5-8% and top campaigns hitting 15-25%. For most B2B teams, email is the best first-touch and the phone is the best conversion tool, so the real win is using both together in a coordinated cadence.
How many cold emails or cold calls does it usually take to book a meeting?
Data shows most outbound wins come after multiple touches. On the phone, it typically takes about three call attempts to connect with a prospect, and 90%+ of conversations occur within the first five calls. On email, many studies show that a majority of replies come after at least the second or third message in the sequence. In practice, plan for at least 4-7 touches-across email and phone-before deciding a prospect is truly unresponsive.
Is cold calling dead in 2025?
Not even close-but bad cold calling should be. While the average cold-calling success rate has dropped to roughly 2.3% of conversations turning into meetings, top-performing teams still see 5-10% call-to-meeting rates by using high-quality mobile data, tight ICP targeting, and strong coaching. Many buyers still say they're open to relevant, well-timed calls, and a large share of high-value B2B deals still involve live phone conversations at some point. The channel isn't dead; lazy scripts and random dialing are.
If I have a small sales team, should I prioritize cold emailing or cold calling?
If you're resource-constrained, start with cold email because it scales better and costs less per touch. Use it to identify warm interest-opens, clicks, replies-and then reserve cold calls for your highest-fit accounts and the most engaged prospects. As you grow, you can layer in more phone-led outreach, especially for higher-ACV segments where a few extra minutes on the phone per account pays off in bigger opportunities.
How should SDRs split their time between cold email and cold calling?
A healthy baseline for many B2B teams is something like 50-60% of prospecting time on email and research, and 40-50% on the phone, but the right mix depends on your ACV and audience. Higher-ACV enterprise plays might flip that ratio with more time on phone and LinkedIn, while transactional SMB plays might go email-heavy. The key is to track meetings per rep-hour for each channel and adjust the split quarterly based on what's actually generating pipeline.
What metrics should we track to compare cold emailing vs cold calling?
At a minimum, track: touches per prospect, connect/open rates, conversations/replies, meetings booked, and pipeline generated by channel. Normalize results to something like 'meetings per 100 dials' and 'meetings per 1,000 emails' so you can compare apples to apples. Over time, also watch downstream metrics like show rates, opp creation, and win rates by channel to see if phone-sourced vs. email-sourced meetings differ in quality.
What about compliance for cold outreach—does it change the channel decision?
It should absolutely influence how you execute, especially for US outbound. For cold email, you need to respect CAN-SPAM and local equivalents-honest sender info, clear opt-out, and reasonable relevance. For phone, pay attention to TCPA, DNC lists, and local regulations around dialing mobile numbers. Compliance doesn't mean you can't cold outbound; it just means you need good data hygiene, clear processes, and sometimes a partner who already has compliant infrastructure in place.
How long should we test a channel mix before deciding to change it?
Avoid snap judgments based on a week or two of activity. For most B2B teams, you'll want at least one full sales cycle's worth of data-often 60-90 days-at a reasonable volume (thousands of emails and hundreds or thousands of calls) before you draw conclusions. Use that window to A/B test scripts and sequences within each channel, then adjust your email/phone mix based on statistically meaningful differences in meetings and pipeline.
