Cold calling is absolutely essential to sales success.  Every sales professional should excel at cold calling and needs to spend as much of time time making cold calls.  Really? There is a huge difference between making a lot of cold calls and doing it well.  Obviously there are sales techniques that can increase your success rate when you make a cold call.You will want to expand your training in all areas of sales prospecting and business development. Just like an athlete you need training, practice, remember that only with perfect practice makes a difference, incorrect practice just makes the mistakes you made last time, permanent. Why do my salespeople not like doing cold calls but still do them?   They know that it is the easy method they have always used to generate new business.  Too many salespeople fall into this group.  They don’t enjoy cold calling but they do it anyway.  You can make cold calling more enjoyable, and successful, by understanding how to go about setting up the cold call to not be a cold call.  When cold calling you need a many and varied arsenal of sales tools, as you dont know what you are about to encounter. Depending on your industry cold calling can be the least effective way to generate new business.  So depending if you sell waste bin contracts door to door cold calls are one of your best tools to get a sale but it would be in your best interests and that of your feet, for you to spend time on other methods of generating new business. Statistics show that a large number of salespeople continue to spend too much time on this low payoff activity. Low success rate = bad cold calls.  Yet a lot of sales managers resort to making the salespeople do this activity and get poor results. Why? Because that is what they where made to do. I am not saying that a sales professional should not spend time prospecting for new business it is just one tool in your sales arsenal.  I believe that other methods besides cold calling are more effective at winning new business.  If you are a salesperson or a sales manager you all need to understand and excel at prospecting, cross selling & business development. You need to be trained and just like and athlete keep up the training.