A hundred calls out. Ten returned.
The man on the other end of that silence was a marketing consultant. Experienced, credentialed, and selling something worth buying. He had a practice to fill, so he did what every business development playbook tells you to do. He picked up the phone and started calling CEOs.
His pitch was reasonable. Set a meeting. Ask about the company’s biggest challenges. Isolate a problem, then propose a solution. A clean value exchange. Textbook outbound.
The phone did not care. Ninety of those CEOs never called back.
Before I go further, here is where this story comes from and how far I can stand behind it. Darrell Gurney tells it in Never Apply for a Job Again!, published in 2012 after 25 years in recruiting and career coaching. The book is written for job seekers. I could not get access to the full text to check the details, and the story appears nowhere else online. So treat the numbers as one man’s account of his own experience, not as a study. I am telling it anyway, because the mechanism underneath it is well documented and you can test it yourself this week for the cost of a few phone calls.
This was not a rookie fumbling through a script. This was an experienced operator with a legitimate offer, calling exactly the right people, with a reasonable ask. Ninety of them treated his voicemail like junk mail.
You have felt this. Maybe not with CEOs. Maybe it was the local business owner who ghosted your follow-up email, the prospect who said send me some info and then vanished, the referral who agreed to a call and cancelled twice. Silence has a texture to it. It makes you question whether the problem is your offer, your timing, or you.
It was none of those things. The problem was the frame.
What changed: the reason for the call
Gurney’s advice was simple. Stop calling to sell. Start calling to learn.
The consultant started writing articles for trade publications his prospects actually read. Real articles, not sales collateral in a disguise. He picked topics he understood and questions he wanted answered.
Then he called the same kind of executive again. This time he did not ask for twenty minutes to discuss their challenges. He asked whether he could interview them for a piece he was writing.
The callback rate went from 10% to 90%. Gurney gives the rate for the second round but not the number of calls behind it, so read it as a rate and not as ninety people.
Same person dialling. Same kind of executive. The only thing that changed was what the call was about. One version said I need something from you. The other said I want to learn from you.
Why people dodge your outreach, and it is not because they are busy
Most sales advice assumes prospects ignore you because they are overwhelmed, distracted, or cannot see the value yet. So you follow up harder. Add more value to the pitch. Lead with a case study. Try a different subject line.
The reason is simpler and more human than that.
People avoid situations where they might have to say no.
This part is not folklore. Vanessa Bohns at Cornell has spent years studying what happens when people ask other people for things. Her review of that research describes a refusal as a face-threatening act, and finds that people agree to things they would rather not do purely to avoid the discomfort of turning someone down.
Now the complication, which I am including because it makes the point stronger rather than weaker. The headline finding from that same research is the opposite of what you would expect. People badly underestimate how often a direct ask gets a yes. In one fundraising study, participants predicted they would need to approach about 210 strangers to hit their donation target. They needed 122.
So if direct asks work better than we think, why did ninety CEOs ignore one?
Because nobody had to say no. That is the whole thing. Refusing is uncomfortable, so people arrange their lives to avoid the moment it happens. A voicemail from a stranger who wants to sell you something can be avoided at no cost at all. No refusal, no awkwardness, no reply. The ask never gets made, so the yes never gets a chance.
Change the ask to one that carries no rejection risk and the avoidance has nothing to feed on. Nobody has to turn down a request for their opinion. You are not asking for money, a commitment, or a decision. You are asking for their expertise, which means you are telling them they are worth learning from.
Being asked for your opinion feels good. Being asked for your money does not.
"That's nice, but I need revenue this month"
Let us stop here. If you are a tradie, a bookkeeper, a café owner, or someone running a small agency with payroll due on the 15th, you are probably thinking something like this:
I do not have time to write articles. I do not have a publication to write for. I cannot spend three months building relationships while my pipeline dries up. I need the phone to ring this week.
Fair. And this is not a trick that replaces your marketing overnight.
But notice what the consultant did not do. He did not add a second job. He replaced the activity that was already failing. Those hundred cold calls were not free. They cost him time, energy and morale. He redirected the same effort into a different frame.
Imagine how one of those interviews goes. You are sitting in someone’s office with a notebook, asking about their business and writing down the answers. You have not mentioned your own company once. At some point the conversation turns and they ask what you do.
That is the moment. According to Gurney, the consulting work came out of the meetings themselves rather than a long nurture sequence. The research call was the sales call. Neither side treated it as one, which is exactly why it worked.
The decision is usually made before you hear about it
Here is a number that should rearrange how you think about winning clients. Forrester’s 2024 Buyers’ Journey Survey found that 92% of B2B buyers already have a shortlist of one or more preferred vendors when they start their purchasing process. 41% report having a single vendor in mind when they first begin. Even among first-time buyers, 48% report entering the process with a preferred vendor in mind.
Forrester’s own reading of that is careful and worth keeping careful. For these buyers, they say, the journey is “likely a process of confirmation, not one of selection.”
You already knew this, because you do it too. Think about the last time you hired someone. Did you post a job ad and sift through 200 applicants, or did you ask someone you trust whether they knew anyone good? Think about the last time you needed an accountant, a web designer, a signage company. Did you Google it, or did you ask around first?
By the time an RFP goes out, a brief gets posted, or a looking-for-recommendations thread appears on LinkedIn, there is usually already a favourite. Not always a decision. But a preference, formed months earlier, that everything else now gets measured against.
So when you spend your marketing energy at the point where the brief lands, you are arguing with a preference that was set long before you arrived. The real game is being the name that surfaces before the search begins.
Research-first outreach builds exactly that. Every genuine conversation, every question you ask about someone’s business, every article or post you make out of what you learn, puts something in that person’s head. Not this person wants my money. Instead, this person understands my world.
When the need arrives, that is the person who gets the call.
What this looks like if you are not writing for Forbes
You do not need a magazine column. You do not need to be a consultant. The principle scales down to any business.
The landscaper calls five property managers, not to pitch a maintenance contract, but to ask what their biggest grounds problems are between October and March, for a seasonal guide he is putting together. The guide becomes a blog post, a handout, and a reason to follow up. Those five property managers now know a landscaper who understands their year.
The bookkeeper contacts ten local owners to ask about the cash flow mistakes they made in their first three years, for a piece she is researching. Some of those conversations will surface someone who needs a bookkeeper. She never asked for the work. They brought it to her.
The marketing agency interviews its own prospects for a quarterly report on how small retailers in the city are spending their marketing budgets. Now it has content, relationships, and a list of warm contacts who associate the name with expertise rather than sales pressure.
The pattern is the same every time. Lead with curiosity, make something out of what you learn, and let the work follow the relationship.
The principle underneath the tactic
Strip away the specifics, the CEOs, the articles, the callback rates, and one principle sits underneath all of it.
Being interested attracts. Being needy repels.
Dale Carnegie got there in 1936. He put it as making more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than in two years spent trying to make them interested in you. Ninety years later, nobody has improved on it, and most marketing still ignores it.
It works in dating. It works in friendships. It works in business development for the same reason it works everywhere else. People move toward those who are curious about them and away from those who want something from them. Not because they are selfish. Because they are human.
Every piece of marketing you put out says one of two things. I need your business, or I understand your world. Every cold email, every ad, every post, every networking conversation carries one of those two signals, and your prospects hear it before they finish the first line.
The consultant learned this with a phone and a hundred CEOs. The principle was true long before those calls, and it will still be true long after your current marketing strategy runs its course.
There is a phone on a desk somewhere right now. Yours, probably. Same contacts, same area code, same reach as yesterday.
The question is not whether to pick it up. It is what you say when someone answers.
I would love to tell you about what we do gets you a 10% world. I would love to learn about what you do gets you a 90% one.
Same phone. Same you. Different frame.
Your marketing, looked at properly
Thirty minutes on your current setup — what’s working, what’s quietly leaking budget, and what I’d fix first. You’ll leave with a clearer picture whether we work together or not.
Got something specific bugging you? Flag it when you book and I’ll have it looked at before we talk.
