Is cold calling dead? What research on B2B buyers actually says

Is cold calling dead? No. Buyers still take meetings from sellers who reach out, and the phone is still one of the main ways those meetings start. In a RAIN Group study of 488 buyers, 82% said they accept meetings with sellers who contact them proactively, and 54% said the seller behind their most recent meeting reached out by phone. What is dying is the generic call. In a 2024 Gartner survey, 73% of B2B buyers said they actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach.

So both camps have a point. Below you find what the research says, where it is weak, and what it means for a calling team in Belgium or the Netherlands.

What "dead" would actually look like

If cold calling were truly dead, you would expect three things. Buyers would refuse meetings that start with outreach. Phone calls would play no role in how meetings are booked. And teams that call well would book no more meetings than teams that call badly.

None of these three is what the research shows. Buyers still accept meetings, the phone still features, and the gap between average and strong callers is large. Let's look at each piece of evidence.

What buyers say: they still take meetings

The most quoted study comes from RAIN Group, a sales training firm. It surveyed 488 buyers, who together represented $4.2 billion in purchases across 25 industries, plus 489 sellers who prospect. The results were published in 2018. A few findings matter for callers:

• 82% of buyers said they accept meetings with sellers who reach out to them proactively.
• For their most recent meeting, 54% of buyers said the seller had connected by phone and 58% by email. Many outreach efforts used both, so the numbers overlap.
• 71% of buyers who accept meetings want to talk to sellers early, when they are looking for new ideas. 62% want to talk when they are actively looking for a solution to a problem.
• Buyers also said 58% of sales meetings are not valuable to them.

RAIN Group also reports that it takes an average of 8 touches to get a meeting with a buyer. So the door is open, but rarely on the first try. And once you are in, the meeting has to be worth the buyer's time.

What call data says: low odds, big differences

Surveys tell you what people say. Call data tells you what happens. Two vendor datasets are useful here.

Gong, a company that records and analyses sales calls, looked at more than 300 million cold calls. The average rep reached a prospect on 5.4% of dials, about one conversation per 19 calls. The top quarter of callers reached 13.3%, about one per 8 calls. Then the gap widens: the average rep turned 4.6% of conversations into a meeting, the top quarter 16.7%.

Gong also reports that email reply rates were higher when a call was part of the outreach: 3.44% with cold calling against 1.81% without. It does not give the sample for that comparison, so treat it as a signal, not proof.

The 2025 cold calling report by Cognism, a B2B data company, uses call data from its partner WHAM, which made many of its recent calls from the UK into mainland Europe. In 2024, 4.82% of conversations ended in a booked meeting. The average call lasted about 93 seconds in 2025. And 93% of all conversations happened within the first three attempts.

Read together, this says: the odds per dial are low, but they are not zero. And the difference between an average and a strong caller is not a few percent. It is a multiple.

The case against: buyers want less contact with reps

The people who say cold calling is dead are not making it up. Their best evidence comes from Gartner.

In a Gartner survey of 632 B2B buyers, held in August and September 2024, 61% said they prefer an overall buying experience without a sales rep. Buyers preferred digital self-service for general information and learning, and still wanted seller input for questions about fit. The same release reports that 73% actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach.

But there is a twist. In a 2024 Gartner research summary, 43% of buyers reported high purchase regret when they completed a purchase through self-service digital commerce, against 26% for traditional purchases led by a rep. Buyers say they want fewer reps, but they are more satisfied when a good one is involved.

Why both sides are right

Put the findings side by side and the picture becomes clear:

• Buyers still accept meetings, but they want them to be relevant and useful.
• Buyers avoid suppliers who waste their time with outreach that has nothing to do with them.
• Most dials do not reach anyone, so a team needs volume and a follow-up plan.
• The best callers get many times more meetings from the same number of dials.

The conclusion is not "call more" or "stop calling". It is: call fewer of the wrong people, and make every conversation worth having. For more on how buyers move through a purchase today, read how B2B buyers buy.

What to change in your calling

Three practical steps follow from this.

1. Earn the first 30 seconds. With calls of around a minute and a half, you have little time. Open with something specific to the buyer's role or sector. Our guide to cold call opening lines has examples.
2. Plan the follow-up before you dial. RAIN's 8 touches and Cognism's three attempts both say the same thing: one call is not a campaign. See sales follow-up for a schedule you can copy.
3. Bring something useful. In the RAIN study, buyers said relevant data and content tailored to their situation made them more likely to accept a meeting. A short insight about their market works better than a list of features.

Test it in your own market

None of these studies measured Belgium or the Netherlands specifically. A Flemish family business may react very differently from a Dutch scale-up. So do not decide based on someone else's numbers. Run a test:

1. Pick one target group and one offer.
2. Call for four weeks, with a fixed number of attempts per lead.
3. Log one outcome for every call: not reached, conversation, call back, meeting, not interested or invalid number.
4. Calculate your connect rate and your conversation-to-meeting rate.
5. Work out the cost per meeting and compare it with your other channels.

Our article on how many calls it takes to get a customer shows how to turn those rates into a weekly call target. Ringlane is built for exactly this kind of test: one outcome key per call, the next step planned automatically, and reports on connect rate and conversation-to-meeting rate per campaign and per caller.

The limits of this research

Be honest about what these numbers can and cannot tell you:

• Vendor data. RAIN Group sells sales training, Gong sells call analysis, Cognism sells B2B data and Gartner sells research. Each has an interest in its own story.
• Age. The RAIN buyer survey was published in 2018. Buying habits have shifted since.
• Different definitions. A "connect" or a "conversation" does not mean the same thing in every dataset, so do not compare the numbers one to one.
• Correlation, not cause. Top callers may also have better lists or easier markets. The data shows a gap, not exactly why it exists.
• Not local. None of the samples is specific to the Belgian or Dutch market.

That is why your own numbers, gathered over a few weeks, are worth more than any benchmark in this article.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. RAIN Group Center for Sales Research: study on sales prospecting myths (press release via CustomerThink, 2018)
2. RAIN Group: 4 essential elements of a winning prospecting strategy
3. Gong: The hidden power of cold calling, insights from 300M calls
4. Cognism: The State of Cold Calling in 2025
5. Gartner: Sales survey finds 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience (2025)
6. Gartner: Increase buyer enablement through a digital content strategy (2024 abstract)