If you think cold calling is
obsolete or impossible in a post-pandemic world, buckle up.
Today we’re covering tactics that work for cold calling in 2025.
In this episode of closing Time,
thanks for tuning in to Closing Time, the show for Go to Market Leaders.
I’m Geoff Coutts,. SVP of Sales and Customer Operations
for Unbounce, Insightly, and leads Rx.
Today I’m joined by Troy Munson.
Troy is the CEO of Dimmo, a software demo firm.
Thanks for joining us, Troy.
Yeah. Geoff, thank you so much for having me.
Happy to be here. Our pleasure.
Hey, Troy, I just before we get going,. I see some parallels in our backgrounds
a little bit.
It looks like you started working for a couple of large
companies in your past, and then you moved into smaller organizations.
Can you tell us just a little bit about that journey and what it’s meant for you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it’s funny, I
actually had a conversation about this not too long ago with a sales rep,
and she was asking me, should I go join a larger company or a smaller company?
They are two completely different worlds,
and I think that you learn so much from both of them.
What I’ve noticed is with the larger company, a much larger company,
is that it,. I hate using this word because it’s not,
but it’s a little bit more laid back, right?
There’s more structure
you have, like your weekly trainings, you have your weekly one on ones,
all of that stuff.
But then when you join a really fast growing startup,
it’s kind of like the Wild West.
You have hundreds of accounts, there’s no structure, it’s a mess.
You don’t expect, you know, legal to be on top of everything.
Don’t expect infosec to be there exactly when you need them.
It’s kind of like a mess. And so
I people always ask me what I prefer and
I don’t have a preference.
I think they’re both really fun.
But it’s funny, I’ve built side gigs and that side Dimmo was a side
gig before I took a full time.
And it was a really good time to be at a larger company because I had more time
to dedicate towards towards Dimmo, but never really recommend that.
Never recommend that.
But yeah, other than that,
there’s a lot, there’s a lot, of course, that you’ve learned
from both sides, but that’s kind of what I’ve noticed from, from both of them.
And I’ve learned that you can just
you got to just, buckle down, regardless of where you’re at.
That’s great.
That’s great.
So tell me just a little bit about Dimmo.
What’s the problem that you’re trying to solve for in the marketplace?
And how did you get the company off the ground?
Yeah.
So real quickly about Dimmo, we are a software marketplace.
So the idea is right now we’re essentially. YouTube for B2B software.
So somebody that is looking at CRM software can go into our sales section,
click on CRM and see 20 different CRM platform demos, not, you know,
your marketing videos that have drums and animated characters and stuff.
It’s like an actual walkthrough of the platform,
how sellers and sales leaders would use it.
And so that’s what it is today.
My idea is how do we actually help with the evaluation process?
So if you’re evaluating Insightly and you’re evaluating Pipedrive
and you’re evaluating another one, can you somehow put the 3 in 1 spot?
Let us know what your tech stack
is, your problems, your budget, and can we recommend a technology to you.
And then you can go inbound.
And then that’s that sales cycle has become shorter.
And so that’s kind of what it is.
And that’s how we’re going and that’s the direction that we’re heading.
Sounds like a great need in the marketplace.
And congrats on getting it off the ground.
Let’s change gears a little bit.. I want to talk about cold calling.
There’s, there’s a lot of noise in the market about cold calling.
Right?
It’s a very tough thing to do.
I know our team does it.
But how would you say that it’s changed post-pandemic?
Talk about the before and after state of the pandemic.
From your perspective, how do you see the world changing?
Yeah.
So when it comes to cold calling,. I mean, the very obvious change
is the fact that office numbers
don’t work as well as they did in 2019 and before 2019.
You can call 100 people and get a decent amount of next five, six, seven years ago.
But now with mobile being the way that people are calling
and the way that people want to reach out,
and of course, office phones, if they’re in the office as well.
That’s the biggest change, is the fact that
you’re calling one into numbers that don’t have a as high of a connect.
Right? So that can be demoralizing.
That can be demotivating rather,
because you’re just calling in, next thing you know, it’s voicemail up,
voicemail to voicemail.
Two, because we are calling mobile phones.
I think that people are more hesitant to answer a random
number on their mobile phone.
And so that’s the second change that I’m seeing.
One other change,
I think that people that have gotten into sales in the last five years haven’t
really been trained well to cold call because it was much easier to cold email.
So now that these,
you know, 22, 23, 24, 25 year olds are stepping into the sales world
that relied on email, it’s a lot tougher for them to cold call
because that’s not what they were forced to do in the beginning.
So that’s another really, really big change. I actually.
Yeah, I got that. Let’s.
Let’s hold that thought for a minute, because I want to go down that path a bit.
Based on what you said and the difficulty around,
connect rates post-pandemic.
Would you say that there are some technology options
available in the marketplace that would help with cold
calling that maybe didn’t exist five, ten years ago?
Yeah.
So luckily I’m in a position where I add
I manually add technologies onto Dimmo.
And so I know about 530 plus technologies today.
And so all that to say. Yeah.
So of course
I think the, the hot ones on the market right now are parallel dialers.
So you call 20 people and as soon as one person picks up,
it hangs up on all the others and it puts you on that line.
Some people hate that because there is like
a small little click and a wait time when you get onto that line.
So that’s a way to kind of go through your, let’s say you have a list of 2000,
numbers.
That’s a way to go through that pretty fast.
But then there’s other technology that is really popular that
it takes your list, and it does this for their entire customer base,
and it just monitors who’s answering and who’s not.
And then it tells people, hey,
these people are more likely to answer because they’ve answered
hundreds of cold calls in the past based on our customer base.
So they literally tier out your numbers for you
and say, call these numbers first because they’re more likely to answer.
And those companies are giving out 15 to 25% connect rates on the phone in 2025.
So there’s a lot of technology out there.. Yeah.
just to be clear on that.
That’s customers
answering any number of vendors calls that have been monitored over history.
And so that data is available to
other organizations to be able to make the best use of Yeah.
The way they do it.
And again,
I’ve only seen the demo because it’s on. Dimmo is you upload your contact list
and then it’ll go through their database of knowing like, hey, I know
Geoff has answered 30 times out of a thousand cold calls.
He’s going to be on the bottom of the list.
So you upload your list and it’ll pretty much score it for you.
Of who is more likely to answer and who is not.
So then you can focus on the top.
Yeah.
That that alone sounds like a good reason to go visit the Dimmo site.
I love it.
So let me ask you this question because you mentioned,
new people coming into an SDR, BDR type of role.
I’m a sales leader.
Would you say that the onus is on us as leaders who have been in the game,
both pre-pandemic and post-pandemic, to get our reps
all the right experiences, skill sets, training, mentoring,
to be able to be really effective at cold calling?
Or how would you say people should go about that?
I would say absolutely.
I think it is on management first.
Now there are again, because I’m very well aware of what tools are out there.
AI does a really good job at letting reps role play,
so they can kind of get those nerves out before they go on a cold calling, block.
So they can just call people
that are like their ICP and answer as if it was their ICP.
But I think it’s on leadership.
And I think one way to do that is remove every other option
when they are first starting out.
So don’t let them cold email the first three months.
Don’t let them cold.
You know, doing is social selling the first three months.
Get them, use the phones and then start opening up other channels.
That’s the only way that I think people could get used to it.
That’s great advice.
Just dive right into the deep end. Yeah.
Oh yeah. Okay.. So let’s let’s change gears a little bit.
You mentioned a minute ago, the idea of emailing or cold emailing.
A lot of sellers are probably more comfortable there,
since they haven’t been as hands on with the phones for several years.
But there’s probably some common mistakes that you see being made
over and over again.
What what what would you have to say about the email process?
Yeah.
So I love cold email.
I’m actually very bullish on cold email.
I slowed ever since I stepped in the CEO role.
I’ve slowed the cold calling down.
And it’s a lot of email
or LinkedIn prospecting, things like that, because that’s where my ICP is.
But I say this because I actually ran analytics on my
the largest deals. I’ve ever closed my sales career
and all of them came from cold email but one.
And I think the reason for that is because if somebody replies so cold email,
chances are there’s an actual pain.
You wrote a good email.
They’re like, yes, this ticks my box, let’s have a chat versus cold calling.
If somebody picks up, it’s the easiest way to book meetings if you want to go,
if you want to spend five hours writing emails or five hours
cold calling, is you’ll book more meetings cold calling.
But there might be more no shows, and it might be less qualified
because people are scared to say no over the phone.
But there’s five mistakes that I see via email all the time.
One is just the length of the email.
If you are, if you’re on a mobile phone or even on a on a, desktop,
if you have to scroll and there’s huge blocky paragraphs,
that’s the biggest problem.. That’s kind of like the biggest turnoff.
Like people, we don’t have that attention span anymore.
We can just sit there and read a book as a cold email.
So I think that’s one thing.
The second mistake that I see is the constant use of “I.”
So I do this, I solve for this,. I help with this.
I is all about. I instead of like telling a story
or letting them feel like they’re the ones that are in control of the email.
Third thing is filler words.
So it’s like somebody would be like, hey, my name is Troy
Munson, I’m at this company.
I’m just reaching out because.
You could just say, hey, notice that, you know,
just reaching out because I saw that you’re hiring, etc.
you could just say, hey,. Geoff, saw that you were hiring.
Like, you can remove all that noise and make it look much more, much shorter.
The fourth thing is people try to sound too smart.
They think that the smarter they sound, the more that they give, and the more
maybe respect that the other person will have on the other end.
But if I go up to you in person and I’m trying to sell Dimmo to you, I promise
I’m going to write the email as if we’re having an in-person conversation.
I’m not going to say, like, you know, we simplify complexities because of this.
Like, that’s just not how people talk.
And then the fifth thing is just the call to action is is very, very long.
So it’ll say, hey,
do you have time next Thursday to strategize about your 2024 plans?
Just, hey, is this worth exploring or any interest waste of time?
Like something like that is those are like the five main mistakes that I see.
And just about every email. I love it.. Those are.
Those are great points to call it.
I love the. I love the brevity comment the most.
I mean, like many people,. I also get lots of reach outs.
And, you know, one of the things I think about
a lot is a lot of people in their email
have the preview line right of the first line of an email,
and there’s got to be something in there that catches attention.
So being brief enough in that first line is important.
And then I love what you said about a really simple call to action
coming out of this so that it’s not confusing what the end game is.
Thanks for that.. That was that was really useful.
How would you say,
that works in tandem with social selling, which is becoming much more popular?
It’s becoming really popular.
And if you’re ICP, and I think social selling realistically is kind of LinkedIn,
but I think that it’s, it’s works really well.
So I have this belief that if you have a familiar face,
then you’re doing things right.
And so if you’re on LinkedIn, send them a connection request, comment
on the things that they post about.
And instead of doing a,
because you’re already
kind of doing a pitch via email instead of doing a pitch via LinkedIn,
I think the best way to go about
it is more so just give them something of value like,
hey, we just analyzed a lot like the last thousand sellers emails.
I want to share with you, like the one mistake that they did they make.
Can I send that over?. Like something like that?
Like, the idea is, how do they see your face?
How do they see your name?
How do they then associate you with, hey, he’s tried to help me out.
She’s tried to help me out.
And then also when you go over to email, great.
Like, you know this person from LinkedIn because you’ve seen their faces
in their name.
They comment on your post.
They do all you know that, do all that good stuff.
And then at the same time, if somebody is like accepting
your connection request,. I think that’s the best time.
If you have their mobile number or any sort of phone number,
call them the second they, if you’re not on a call.
The second that they accept your request, they’re either
not in a meeting which or they’re bored in the meeting, one or the other.
Right.
So, so yeah, usually it’s a really good time to call
because, you know, that they’re kind of distracted from their day to day tasks.
Yeah. That’s great advice, a great advice.
Okay, I got one last question for you, which is there’s a lot of, noise
in the system across the industry about whether or not
you should just be using outbound email.
And is that alone? Is that enough?
Is it sustainable to be able to get results?
We’re trying to get and get people’s attention. No.
Absolutely not. I don’t think it is.
I think the second you start automating your emails, which most companies do,
and there’s nothing wrong with it,
I think everybody should have some sort of outbound engine always running.
But I see that as more like a marketing touch.
Kind of like let them know what you’re about.
Customers have help. Things like that.
It’s just like having a use case on your website and they go and check it out.
And so no, I think if you’re only relying on cold email,
you can see some quick wins.
But I don’t think, like you mentioned,. I don’t think it’s sustainable.
That’s great.
Try, listen, this is great.
So many creative suggestions for what. I consider a very difficult topic,
but I think the more creative you get to try and get people’s
attention, the, the more progress you can make.
So, hey, listen, thanks so much for joining us on Closing Time.
Really appreciate you joining.
Where, quick plug for for you and Dimmo.
Where can people learn more about Dimmo.
Yeah.
Dimmo, Dimmo.ai, and then I post
about Dimmo a lot on LinkedIn, so I just Troy Munson there.
Awesome. That’s great. Thank you.
And thanks to all of you for joining in, joining us in that closing time
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