I’ve spent twenty years studying why salespeople find it so hard to pick up the phone and call. I’ve heard enough excuses for three careers. For a while I believed the problem was the tools. Then the processes. Today I know it’s neither.
The fact is: nothing in sales creates revenue faster than a phone call. And nothing gets postponed longer. It’s easier to tweak the sequence one more time. To build one more automation. Yet five minutes of conversation, in which the customer hears your voice and feels you understand their situation, gets you further than a week on most other channels. And that’s exactly why calling works: almost nobody does it.
My thesis: reluctance to call isn’t a technology problem, and it isn’t a motivation problem either. It’s a hiring problem - more precisely, a selection problem. You don’t fix a salesperson who won’t call with a tool. You fix it by hiring someone else next time.
Don’t get me wrong: your sales machine probably runs. The CRM is full, the sequences go out, the reports look good. The constraint isn’t the machinery. It’s the person sitting behind the phone. I’ve been listening to the same excuses for twenty years. They fall into two categories. We solved both. It didn’t help.
The first category was technical. “We need one-click calling,” they said. Looking up numbers, typing them in, redialling when the customer doesn’t pick up - too slow. Fair enough - fifteen years ago that was even true. Today click-to-call is a setting in HubSpot, not a project. Solutions like this have been in production for at least ten years. They stopped being reserved for complex contact centres long ago. Even redialling handles itself. An unanswered call lands back in the queue. No sticky notes. The excuse lost its technical basis. It survived without one.
Once the click was no longer the problem, the second excuse took its place: every call needs preparation if it is going to succeed. I completely agree. What I don’t agree with is the arithmetic used to justify no more than five first prospecting calls in a working day. Eight hours, five calls - an hour and a half of preparation for each conversation. That calculation has been obsolete for two years.
Breeze now brings me the full context for every person before the call, served on a tray: who they are, what they’ve read on our site, what’s happening in their company. It even writes my opening line and a small-talk topic. All I have to do is read it. A minute, maybe two.
I went a step further and built myself an agent. Every day, it identifies the people most worth calling, based on the likelihood of a useful outcome. It prepares the research for each one. One click in HubSpot and I’m connected. After the call, it logs the activity and updates the context for the next step. Preparation that once consumed a morning has become something I read over coffee.
Here’s where it gets interesting. We solved the click. We solved the preparation. The excuses are still here, only dressed differently - now something else is “missing”. After twenty years of watching excuses survive every solution, you reach an uncomfortable conclusion: the cause was never where they pointed.
Technology has taken away the last alibi. What’s left is the person.
Psychologists George Dudley and Shannon Goodson measured this for decades under the name sales call reluctance. Their numbers are unpleasant: up to 80% of new salespeople who fail in their first year fail because of too little prospecting. A full 40% of experienced salespeople admit episodes of reluctance severe enough to threaten their careers. By their measurements, the average reluctant salesperson misses 15.25 new business opportunities a month.
The most telling part of their legacy: a selection questionnaire. Companies use it to measure reluctance before they hire. So reluctance to call isn’t a process flaw a better CRM would fix. It’s a trait. And traits can’t be configured.
The most ironic part of the story: buyers want the call. RAIN Group surveyed 488 B2B buyers. 57% of C-level buyers prefer the phone over any other channel - more than the directors (51%) and managers (47%) below them. 82% of buyers at least sometimes accept a meeting with a salesperson who calls them proactively. And 71% want to hear from a provider early, while they’re still looking for ideas.
Read that again: the people with the biggest budgets prefer the phone. Salespeople are avoiding precisely the channel their most important prospects are most willing to answer. Their inboxes are packed. The line is free.
When a managing director asks me today to help revive phone sales, I don’t start with technology. I start with a single question: do you have salespeople who create demand, or salespeople who respond to it? The question usually triggers a silence that says more than the answer. If you don’t see yourself creating demand, you’re not in sales. Not in B2B, anyway.
Technology still matters - we have simply misunderstood its role. It doesn’t remove reluctance; it removes friction. The system I built for myself is what we now build for clients at FrodX. It finds the right person, prepares the context you need before you dial, connects the call with one click and handles the administration afterwards. By the time you pick up the phone, the hard part is done. All that’s left is the conversation.
Who will have that conversation is no longer a technology question. We’re back where we started: it’s a question for the hiring process. You can ask it in the interview, word for word. Will you create demand or wait for it? The candidate’s face will tell you more than the CV.
After twenty years, I’ve officially stopped collecting excuses. There are no new ones left - technology has removed the last. What remains is the phone, which was never the problem, and the question of who you put in front of it.
[igor.pauletic@frodx.com](mailto:igor.pauletic@frodx.com)
P.S. All thirteen prompts Breeze uses to prepare my pre-call research, plus one complete real output, are in one document. No forms, no sign-up - one click and it’s yours.