38 Cold Calling Playbooks CEOs Used to Add $2M Revenue

In this article, you will learn the exact cold calling systems top software CEOs have used to generate millions in revenue from scratch. These founders didn’t rely on expensive ads or viral marketing; they built powerful outbound sales machines, and we’re sharing their blueprints with you. You’ll get the 5-step playbook to launch your own cold calling engine, complete with real-world examples and dozens of case studies you can use for inspiration.

These strategies come directly from successful founders like Andre Cvijovic at Referrizer, who scaled to $3.8 million in revenue making 30,000 cold calls a week, and Kyle Vamvouris of Vouris, who has built over 70 high-performing B2B sales teams from the ground up.

The 5-Step Playbook To Land Your First 100 Customers With Cold Calling

Hire Superstars Only: The success of any cold calling operation begins with the people making the calls. Focus on hiring commission-only “superstars” who are motivated by performance. Andre Cvijovic of Referrizer crafted a compelling Craigslist ad with the headline “Superstars Only” and “Make $350,000 a year,” attracting hundreds of ambitious applicants. He then uses a tough 5-minute interview process, starting with the question “Why are you a superstar?” and immediately pushing back with “Sorry, but I don’t hear it” to test their resilience against rejection. This ensures only the most persistent and confident salespeople join his team.
Build Targeted Lead Lists for Free: High-quality leads are the fuel for your cold calling engine. Instead of buying expensive and often inaccurate lists, leverage free resources. The Referrizer team discovered a hack using local library cards to access the ReferenceUSA database (powered by InfoUSA), which contains detailed information on over 78 million businesses, including phone numbers, revenue, and employee count—the same data that costs thousands from providers like ZoomInfo.
Develop a Repeatable Sales Process: A documented, objective, and measurable sales process is critical for scaling. Kyle Vamvouris emphasizes defining clear, objective exit criteria for each stage of your sales pipeline. For example, a deal cannot move from the “Qualification” to “Discovery” stage until a demo is officially scheduled on the calendar. This prevents pipeline bloat and ensures every deal has a concrete next step, making forecasting more accurate.
Execute Relentlessly and Track Everything: Success in cold calling is a numbers game, but it must be guided by data. The team at Vouris tracks every part of the funnel, from initial dials and emails to engagement rates, meetings booked, and meetings completed. This allows them to identify the exact bottleneck in their process. If dials aren’t turning into conversations, the script or lead quality might be the issue. If conversations aren’t turning into meetings, the offer or objection handling needs work.
Incentivize Performance with Competition: Top-performing sales teams thrive on competition and rewards. At Referrizer, they gamify the process with daily bonuses. For example, the first three people to book three appointments get an extra $30, and the first person to hit ten appointments gets $100. This creates a high-energy environment where top performers set new benchmarks for what’s possible, encouraging the entire team to push past rejection and hit their targets.

40+ Examples of CEOs Using Cold Calling to Grow Revenue

Here are over 40 examples from SaaS CEOs who have successfully used cold calling and outbound sales tactics to scale their companies. They are categorized by the playbook steps outlined above.

Hiring Superstars and Building the Team

Andre Cvijovic, founder of Referrizer, built his $3.8M ARR business by creating a commission-only sales team, paying them a portion of the setup fee and a 10% residual on monthly fees, ensuring zero upfront cost to acquire a new client.
Kyle Vamvouris of Vouris advises against the “hire and hope” strategy, stating that without a solid, repeatable process, even talented salespeople will fail. He scaled one company from three to 14 SDRs, growing assets from $120M to over $1B in 20 months by focusing on process first.
Andrew Jacoby of Next Sales built a sales-development-as-a-service engine with 36 SDRs based in Eastern Europe, allowing him to build a cost-efficient outbound team for his 45 B2B SaaS clients.
Sindre Haaland of SalesScreen, on his way to $8M in revenue, emphasized that a key to efficiency is having a well-defined team structure where every individual’s actions align with the company’s high-level objectives.
The Referrizer CEO uses a group orientation for interviewing sales candidates, where he has them “interview him” first to build transparency and attract the right talent for his performance-based team.
Michael Burns at vFairs grew a company to over $100M by replacing leadership that couldn’t transition from a managed service to a transactional SaaS sales model, highlighting the need for leaders experienced in high-velocity sales.
Stefan Smulders of Expandi, which hit $7M ARR, built his initial team by targeting growth hackers and agency owners who already understood and used LinkedIn automation, ensuring a baseline of expertise.
Adam Baker of Dealpad, now at $2.4M in ARR, requires his SDRs to spend an hour a day manually prospecting on LinkedIn to deeply understand their ideal buyers, a task that builds foundational sales skills.

Sourcing High-Quality Leads

The team at Referrizer scrapes competitor platforms like Mindbody (60,000 clients) and Groupon (300,000 businesses) to build highly relevant lead lists for their cold callers.
Tony Tommy of Products AI got his first five customers by using Apollo and ZoomInfo with specific filters (10-100M in revenue, 100-400 employees, hiring product managers) to build a targeted list for cold calling.
Joe Ogden of Discoveroo uses Apollo to build his data lists and focuses exclusively on personalized outreach, which helps his team remain GDPR compliant while achieving a 13-15% response rate, nearly double the industry average.
The founder of Expandi used PhantomBuster to scrape the members of a competitor’s Facebook group, converted their profiles into LinkedIn URLs, and then reached out with a highly contextual message that booked 40+ appointments per week.
Rav Gupta of Zenzilla uses his own tool to execute a cold LinkedIn outreach strategy, which has been the primary driver of growth to over $38k in monthly revenue.
Yash Siobhan of Get Sorale used LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find influencer marketing managers at e-commerce brands and sent thousands of cold emails to get feedback, which led to his first five pre-sold customers at $99 each.
Eris Veren of Alfinder uses LinkedIn sales navigator to target small marketing agencies (700k to 5M in revenue) and sends personalized messages to get them on a demo, which resulted in 200 beta testers.
Alex Berman of Omni.us uses his lead generation database, Lead Shark, to find targeted lists and then uses his primary tool, Omni, to send omnichannel outreach sequences involving cold email and cold texts.
Matt Archer of Mahana.io got his first two companies on the platform by sending cold emails with the simple subject line “Trying something new within the collaborative space,” which was effective at peeking curiosity.

Developing a Repeatable Process & Script

The founder of Vouris illustrates how a company grew from $400k to $1.2M in ARR in 11 months by first hiring two experienced AEs to refine the inbound sales process, then adding SDRs for cold outbound, which “completely explodes the pipeline.”
Chris Orlob, who helped grow Gong to $200M ARR, teaches a discovery process that starts with a question like, “Can you help me understand the biggest challenges you’re experiencing that would derail you if you didn’t solve them?” to get to the heart of the deal fast.
The CRO of vFairs implemented a sales methodology called CO-IMPACT to create a common language for his team to discuss deal risk and strategy, moving reps away from subjectivity and toward a data-driven process.
Aseem Badshah, CEO of Socedo, built his company to over $1.5M in revenue by focusing on providing behavioral data on top of existing contacts to help B2B marketers reactivate dormant leads with timely, relevant messaging.
Nicholas Vandenberg of Chili Piper, now at over $2M in ARR, designed his outreach process around his “Concierge” tool, which routes inbound leads to the correct sales rep in real-time, eliminating the leaky bucket of “somebody will call you soon.”
Manny Medina of Outreach.io scaled his sales team by testing 15 different personas across 4 market segments, creating a matrix of customized sequences to ensure messaging was always highly targeted, allowing him to reduce his SDR to AE ratio to 1-to-2.
As part of his sales playbook, Michael Burns sells to objectives, not pain points, asking questions about a prospect’s strategy and tactics to identify gaps that his solution can fill, framing it as a way to de-risk their plan rather than just solve a pain.
Adam Baker of Dealpad, who grew his company to $2.4M ARR, maintains a master 5-page Google Doc with call scripts and objection handling, which the team reviews and iterates on weekly by listening to recorded calls in HubSpot.
Max Altschuler of Sales Hacker, which did $2.5M in 2015, built his conference business by first selling sponsorships before booking a venue, ensuring he never had to pay out-of-pocket for event costs.
Garrett Moon, CEO of CoSchedule, grew his marketing calendar tool to over $400k MRR by starting with inbound marketing long before writing any code, building an email list of over 10,000 interested prospects before launch.

Executing and Tracking Relentlessly

Kyle Vamvouris of Vouris stresses that the “greatest predictor of future pipeline are today’s activities,” advocating for meticulous tracking of dials, emails, and meetings to build a predictable revenue engine.
Chris Marentis of Surefirelocal switched from a primarily inbound model to an outbound-first transactional model, which created predictable revenue and scaled his company to $26M in ARR. His team is heavily KPI-driven, tracking everything from dials to demos to win rate.
The CEO of Referrizer drives his team to make 20,000 cold calls per week, which generates approximately 1,000 demos and 100 new paying clients each month.
Matt PraSaga of Review Wave built his company to a $100M+ valuation by using a call center in San Diego where each rep makes 100 calls per day, a process that reliably converts into one new customer per day per rep.
Amin Yazdani of Craver made outbound successful by adapting the enterprise playbook. Realizing his median time-to-close was under 7 days (not 3-9 months), he adjusted the formula and found his SDRs only needed to book 7-9 demos a week, a much more achievable target for his SMB market.
The founder of Get Sorale sent 30-50 personalized cold emails every day to podcasters he found on Twitter by searching their RSS feeds for contact info. This brute-force approach landed his first 50-100 customers for his audio-sharing tool.
The team at Dealpad records all sales calls using HubSpot and conducts weekly 2-hour reviews where they listen to calls as a team to coach reps and optimize scripts.
Matt Archer of Mahana.io got his first beta users for his collaborative tool by sending cold emails, finding success with his second touchpoint after an initial email to pique curiosity.
Yannick Dickel of Conveno.de got his first paying customers through cold outreach despite having little sales experience before founding the company. His team now uses a mix of direct sales and a partner channel to grow.
Steven, founder of Luna, which is at $24.5k MRR, achieved 50% month-over-month growth by utilizing his own product to execute a high-volume cold email strategy after finding product-market fit.

Incentivizing Performance

The CEO of SalesScreen uses his own gamification platform to make sales work fun and engaging, motivating reps to make extra dials each day through competitions, leaderboards, and real-time recognition.
The founder of Referrizer uses a custom-built dialer and internal leaderboards to show his remote sales team’s performance in real-time, creating a competitive environment where reps are motivated to outperform each other.
Sindre Haaland, CEO of SalesScreen, notes that different reps are motivated differently; some want to top a leaderboard, while others prefer social recognition. He advocates for a mix of incentives, including lotteries where every contribution earns a ticket to win.
Vic at CrazyLister keeps his sales team motivated by maintaining a delicate balance between team members and focusing on organic, sustainable growth rather than succumbing to VC pressure for hyper-growth at all costs.
Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach.io, structures his sales team so that AEs get paid on first-year expansion and then the account is handed to a CSM, incentivizing AEs to land and expand as quickly as possible within the first 12 months.

Conclusion

You’ve just learned the cold calling playbooks used by top SaaS founders to build their companies from the ground up. By focusing on hiring resilient superstars, building targeted lead lists, creating data-driven processes, and relentlessly tracking performance, these CEOs have turned cold outreach into a predictable revenue machine. You now have the blueprint to build your own outbound engine and drive significant growth for your software company. To continue learning from the world’s most successful bootstrapped SaaS founders, explore the free resources at Founderpath.

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