Cold calling C-level executives: how to open

Our gatekeeper article covers how to get past the switchboard and the assistant, and a separate piece covers which openers work in general. This one is about what happens when the CEO actually picks up, and the three ways that call differs from every other cold call. The rules for the call itself, NIX, the Marketing Act and the difference between calling a company and calling a private individual, are in our article on telemarketing rules.

Three things the data says about the C-level

First: they take the call more often than you think. In RAIN Group's prospecting study, with 488 buyers representing 4.2 billion dollars in purchases, 82 percent of buyers said they at least sometimes accept meetings with sellers who reach out proactively, and 49 percent named the phone as a preferred channel. Among C-level and VP buyers the share preferring the phone was 57 percent, against 51 percent of directors and 47 percent of managers. Cognism's 2024 data, on 55,701 dials, showed CEOs and other executives making up 11.91 percent of conversations, the persona most likely to answer. Getting an answer, then, is not the problem.

Second: email works worse the higher you go. Gong's analysis of more than a million executive sales cycles, published in January 2026, shows C-level executives are 30.2 percent less likely to reply to cold emails than non-executives. At C-level, then, the call is not a supplement to the email. It is the main channel. And third: they want fewer questions. Gong's 2018 analysis of 39,105 deals, on calls where only SVP-level buyers or higher were present, found that successful meetings contained four sales questions on average against eight in unsuccessful ones, and that more discovery questions lowered win rates with executives, the opposite of the eleven to fourteen questions that work best with other buyers.

The opening: the reason in ten seconds

Gong's data from 90,380 cold calls shows two things about the first few seconds. Stating the reason for the call raised the chance of a meeting 2.1 times. The question 'did I catch you at a bad time?' lowered it by 40 percent, to a 0.9 percent booking rate. With a CEO, both count double. The reason should fit in one sentence and be about their company, not yours: 'I'm calling because you opened in Norway in August, and three of our customers who did the same ran into trouble with quoting in two languages in the first six months.' No question about time, no introduction of your company, no 'we help companies like yours to'.

The opener 'heard the name tossed around?' had an 11.24 percent booking rate in Gong's data from more than 300 million calls, and Gong describes it as working like a referral because it leads with a context the executive recognises. In Swedish it sounds better as a fact: 'We work with two of your suppliers in Skåne.' True, short, and it gives the CEO a reason to listen for ten more seconds.

The idea instead of the pitch

RAIN Group's study of more than 700 B2B purchases found that what most often separated the winner from the runner-up was that the winner educated the buyer with new ideas and perspectives, three times as often as the runner-up. Among buyers who accept meetings, 71 percent said they want to hear from sellers when they are looking for new ways to drive stronger results. With a CEO, that means the middle of the call is an idea, stated in twenty seconds, with a number the CEO can weigh for themselves: 'Companies your size that moved quoting into one system have typically cut lead time from nine days to four. If that holds for you, it is roughly two deals a quarter. If it does not, I will thank you for the call and let you go.' That last line is not politeness. It is what spares the CEO from having to defend themselves.

Four questions, not fourteen

Gong's four questions with executives are an average, not a rule, but the direction is clear: a CEO does not want to be interviewed by someone they do not know. The four questions that fit in a cold call are these.

1. 'Does that ring true?' after the idea. A yes or a no, and both are useful.
2. 'Who owns that question on your side today?' The CEO knows, and the answer is usually the name of the person you should really meet, now with the CEO's name to refer to.
3. 'What would need to be true for this to be worth half an hour?' The CEO sets the condition, not you.
4. 'Does Thursday at 2 or Friday at 10 work, with your head of procurement joining?' Two times, the participants named.

Two things to leave out. ROI: Gong's executive study shows that mentioning ROI at all during discovery correlates with lower next-meeting rates. And small talk, at this stage: the same study shows one to two minutes of rapport lifts the chance of a next meeting by 3.8 percent in a discovery meeting, but in a cold call to a CEO you do not have those two minutes. Save them for the meeting.

What nobody has measured

The advice 'call the CEO before nine or after five, they answer their own phone then' appears in almost every article on the subject. We went looking for the data behind it at Gong, Cognism, HubSpot, Orum and RAIN Group and found no dataset that splits answer rates by executive level and hour. The time windows that have actually been measured apply to all buyers and point in different directions: Gong's 90,380 calls gave 4 to 5 pm and 11 to 12, Cognism 2024 gave 11 am and 2 pm, Cognism 2025 gave 10 to 11 and 2 to 3. The advice is plausible, since there are fewer gatekeepers outside office hours, but it is unproven. Test it in your own dials for four weeks, by time block and level, before you build a schedule around it. No Swedish study of executive availability exists either, so for Swedish companies the only data that applies is what you measure yourselves.

HubSpot's 2025 survey of 379 sales professionals found that the biggest obstacle for daily cold callers is reaching decision makers: 40 percent named it. But once you do reach one, the outcome is decided in the first thirty seconds, and those can be rehearsed until the reason and the idea come out without a script. In Salesprep's Cold call module you can build a counterpart from pasted text, for instance the CEO's own bio on the company website, and keep calling until the opening holds. Every call is scored on seven metrics with a written comment per score, the opening hook among them. Three calls are free, no card required.