How do you get past the gatekeeper?

Leave with a name, a day and a time

Elena: "Good morning, Lindner Metal, Elena speaking."

Leo: "Hi, could I speak to the person in charge of purchasing?"

Elena: "Who's calling?"

Leo: "It's Leo."

Elena: "What's it about?"

Leo: "We help companies save on workwear."

Elena: "Could you send something to our info address? I'll pass it on."

Leo: "Sure, thanks."

About thirty seconds. Leo writes "gatekeeper, sent info" in the CRM and dials the next number. If your reps make B2B cold calls, you know this call well.

Sales teams call people like Elena gatekeepers and treat them as a wall. Yet she is the one person at Lindner Metal who could tell Leo who looks after workwear, when that person is free and how they like to be reached. She would have told him if he had asked her something she could answer.

Give the call to the main number its own goal. Say in a sentence or two who you are and why you are calling this company, ask who looks after what you sell, and answer each of the receptionist's questions straight. The right person is often busy when you first call, so the call is done when you have their name and a day and time. Then call back at exactly that day and time.

Who answers the main number?

At Lindner Metal it is Elena, the receptionist; in a smaller company it may be an office manager or an assistant. Whoever it is, their job with sales calls is to pass the useful ones to the right person, keep the rest away from busy people and take a message when nobody is free.

They hear sales calls every week, so they know a pitch within the first sentence. Elena also knows that the production manager looks after workwear for the shop floor, that he spends his mornings there, and which extension rings at his desk. None of that is in Leo's CRM.

How many calls end at the info address?

Leo is one of three reps on Nadia's sales team at [company], which supplies workwear and safety shoes to metalworking firms and warehouses. They call mid-size manufacturers and wholesalers in their region, and almost every call goes to a main number. [company], its team, the calls, the counts and the four weeks in this post are an example, not real data.

For two weeks, Nadia had the reps mark how each first call to a main number ended.

Only 22 of the 160 calls were Put through to the right person on the spot. In 18 more, the rep missed the right person but left with a name and a day and time to call, which the team marked Name and time. Of those 18, the callback reached the right person 11 times.

That leaves 120 calls with no name. The most common end was Sent to email, a general email address instead of a name, in 84 calls or just over half of all 160. The other 36 were Said no, with the receptionist declining on the company's behalf. At those 120 companies, the team still could not say who the right person was.

Why do they send you to email?

From Elena's side of the desk, "We help companies save on workwear" asks her to decide whether Lindner Metal wants that and whether it is worth a colleague's time. She cannot decide that for someone else, so she offers the info address. It is safe and polite, and it leaves Leo with no name and nothing to call back about.

Some reps dodge the questions instead, with "He knows me", "It's personal" or "Yes, he's expecting me" when he isn't. Receptionists have heard these lines before, so a dodge usually ends at the info address as well. Once in a while a dodge gets the call through, and then your one conversation with the right person starts badly. He picks up expecting someone he knows, hears a stranger selling workwear and is annoyed before you start. The receptionist remembers your name, too, the next time you call.

What do you say when they ask?

Nadia put Elena's two questions, and the third that often follows them, in a table for her reps. The answers that end in an email address are Leo's old ones, and for the third, which he never got to, she put in the dodge some reps use.

On a Tuesday, the same call made the new way sounds like this.

Elena: "Good morning, Lindner Metal, Elena speaking."

Leo: "Good morning, this is Leo from [company]. We supply workwear and safety shoes to metalworking firms. Who looks after workwear for your production staff?"

Elena: "That would be our production manager. What's it about?"

Leo: "I'd like to ask him a few questions about what your team wears now, to see if a meeting would be worth his time."

Elena: "Is he expecting you?"

Leo: "No, this is my first call. When is a good time to reach him?"

Elena: "He's on the shop floor most mornings. After 14:00 is better. His name is Jonas Keller."

Leo: "Thank you, Elena. Should I call this number and ask for him?"

Elena: "Yes, or ask for extension 214."

Leo: "Then I'll call on Thursday at 14:30 and ask for Jonas Keller. Thanks for your help."

On Thursday at 14:30, Leo calls again.

Leo: "Hello Elena, it's Leo from [company]. We spoke on Tuesday, and you said Jonas Keller is easier to reach after 14:00."

Elena: "That's right. I'll put you through."

Leo's opening answers "Who's calling?" before Elena can ask it, with his name, his company and what it does for firms like hers. The table "What the receptionist asks" is for receptionists who ask anyway.

Asking who looks after workwear for the production staff names one thing for one group, so Elena knows at once whose job it is. "The person in charge of purchasing" left her to guess, because at a metal firm purchasing can mean steel, tools or gas. A question about the job also works when the name on your list is old or missing.

When Elena asks "What's it about?", Leo tells her what he wants to find out, and she can pass that on without judging a sales claim. To "Is he expecting you?" he says no, because it's true, and asks when the production manager is free. Elena can answer that without deciding for a colleague.

He uses her name before he hangs up, and opens Thursday's callback with it and what she told him, so she recognizes the call and puts it through. The Tuesday call took about a minute and ended with a name, a day, a time and an extension.

What if the right person isn't in?

Jonas Keller was on the shop floor on Tuesday, and most of the team's first calls missed the right person too, with only 22 of 160 Put through in the first two weeks. That is normal.

Leave with the right person's name and a day and time, plus an extension or direct line if the receptionist offers one. Don't ask for a mobile number, which is not the receptionist's to give. If you hear "Send it to our info address", say you will, then ask whose name to put on it and when to call to check it arrived. Only a name with a day and time makes it Name and time.

Don't leave a pitch or a sales message with the receptionist either; a message they cannot judge has nowhere to go. If the receptionist says no on the company's behalf, ask once who would look after it, then thank them and leave it. If there is still no name, mark the call Said no.

Make the callback at exactly that day and time, and open it the way Leo did, with the receptionist's name and what they told you. If the right person is still busy, ask when to try next. A callback that misses goes into your team's normal retry rules, covered in our post on when to call again and when to stop.

Once you are put through, the opening to the right person is the next thing to get right; our post on how to open a cold call starts there.

Did the names turn into conversations?

Most of them did. After going through the first two weeks with Nadia, the reps called new companies from the same kind of list for two more weeks, answering the three questions the new way and calling back at the agreed time. The reps and the offer stayed the same, with no campaign or mailing in either period.

"Right person on the callback" counts the Name and time calls where the rep reached the right person at the agreed day and time. Add the calls Put through on the first call and you get "Conversations with the right person". A callback counts in the period of its first call, even when it came a few days later. That gives 33 conversations from 160 calls, then 68 from 150, about twice as many from ten fewer calls. Of the 68, 41 came on the callback, at a time a receptionist had given.

Put through barely moved, from 22 to 27, so the gain came from the names. Calls that ended with no name fell from 120 of 160 to 60 of 150, with 38 Sent to email and 22 Said no, and Name and time went from 18 to 63. The callback reached the right person a little over six times in ten in both periods, 11 of 18 and then 41 of 63, so the extra names led to real conversations. The 22 callbacks that missed in the second period, like the 7 in the first, went into the team's normal retry rules.

Nadia's table stops at the conversation and says nothing about meetings or sales; our post on why booked meetings don't happen picks up from there.

Where does DRING come in?

For the lists your reps don't have time for, DRING runs the outbound campaigns you plan. The agent introduces itself as your company's virtual assistant, says who is calling and why, then asks your questions on need, timing and who decides. When someone asks to be called at a set time, Reach calls at that time.

When a conversation qualifies, the agent books a meeting on the rep's calendar or hands the call over live with the summary. Every outcome, qualified or not, lands in HubSpot, Salesforce or your CRM as the call ends, with the answers and the reason.