Prospect alone without losing your days
You do not have three hours a day to call, and you never will. The good news: you do not need that many, as long as you stop wasting the ones you have.
Two blocks a week, and they do not move
A founder’s prospecting dies of one thing: it always comes after everything else. A customer calls, a bug appears, a hire needs attention, and the slot vanishes. The cure is not willpower, it is the calendar: two 90-minute blocks, say Tuesday and Thursday from 9:30 to 11:00, booked like a customer meeting, visible to the team, never moved.
Three hours a week are enough to open about ten conversations and book two or three meetings, provided every minute of the block is spent on the phone rather than looking for whom to call.
Fifty accounts, not five hundred
A founder does not need a thousand-row list. They need fifty companies that look like their three best customers: same size, same industry, same problem. For each one, a person to reach, a validated number, and one sentence that says why you are calling them specifically.
That list is built once, in two hours, then refreshed with ten accounts a week. It lives in a spreadsheet or in the pre-CRM of your calling tool. What matters is that when the block starts, the list is ready and the numbers are already checked.
- Start from your existing customers: who looks like them?
- One decision-maker or influencer per account, not five contacts.
- Numbers run through the validator before the block, not during it.
Compress your calling time
Dialling, waiting for the ring, hitting voicemail, taking a note, starting again: by hand, a 90-minute block yields about twenty dials and three or four conversations. With a power dialer, the next number goes out as soon as you hang up; with a parallel dialer, several lines ring at once and you only talk to the one that picks up.
For a founder, that is the difference between a frustrating block and a useful one: same time, two to three times more conversations. The prospecting calculator on this site gives the order of magnitude for your own rates.
Delegate everything except the conversation
The one thing a founder does better than anyone is talk about the problem their product solves. Everything else in prospecting can be delegated: building the list, finding numbers, validating them, drafting the opener, sending follow-ups, updating the CRM.
An intern, a part-time assistant or a freelancer can prepare your two blocks in a few hours a week. You arrive at the phone with a ready list and leave with meetings. The day that flow saturates, the next lesson tells you how to hand over.
Key takeaways
- Two 90-minute blocks a week, booked like customer meetings and never moved.
- Fifty accounts that look like your best customers, one person per account, numbers validated before the block.
- A dialer multiplies conversations per block; multitasking divides them.
- You keep only the conversation: everything else gets delegated.
Check what you remember
Question 1 of 4One correct answer per question. The explanation appears after your choice.
Why book calling blocks in the calendar like customer meetings?
Go further
A term you are not sure about? The cold calling glossary
