A Buyer Who Has Heard This Pitch Format Before
Most commercial insurance cold calls land on a business owner who has never really been cold-called about their business before, a restaurant owner, a contractor, a manufacturer. A landlord or portfolio real estate investor is a meaningfully different kind of prospect: they have very likely already been on the receiving end of cold calls from wholesalers asking to buy a property and from lenders asking to refinance one, often about the exact address a producer is now calling about for coverage.
What Cross-Industry Cold-Calling Data Shows in 2026
Cognism’s State of Cold Calling 2026 report, drawn from more than 200,000 analyzed calls across industries, found a 16.6% overall connection rate, meaning roughly five of every six dials end without a live conversation, and a 2.7% average success rate, up from 2.3% in 2025, with top-performing teams reaching 11.3%. That is the baseline any cold outreach, insurance included, is working against before a single word is said.
The Wholesaling Volume Behind a Landlord’s Familiarity
The scale of cold-calling activity aimed specifically at property owners is real and vendor-documented: REsimpli-reported user data shows $15.7 million generated from cold calling in 2024 across the platform’s users, spanning 802 closed deals at an average deal size of roughly $19,600. That figure is a vendor-published customer outcome, not an independently audited study, and should be read as directional evidence of volume, not a precise industry-wide benchmark. Still, it confirms cold calling toward property owners is an active, high-volume channel other industries already run at real scale, not a rare event a landlord might have missed.
Why That Changes the Opening of an Insurance Call
Reasoning, not a cited statistic: a prospect who has fielded property-related cold calls before tends to make a faster read on whether a caller actually knows their portfolio or is working from a generic script. An opener built around one property in isolation risks sounding like the caller has not done the basic homework a landlord already expects from anyone calling about real estate. A caller who references the portfolio, not just the single address on the x-date list, is speaking the buyer’s own frame of reference.
What Doesn’t Change: The Underwriting Conversation Still Has to Happen
None of the above shortens the actual sale. A landlord being comfortable with the format of a cold call is not the same as being ready to switch carriers or discuss exposure, and a producer still has to earn the underwriting conversation, coverage gaps, umbrella adequacy across a multi-property portfolio, on its own merits. Familiarity with cold calls buys a producer a slightly longer opening window, not a shortcut past the actual pitch.
Not Wasting the Opening Window
Getting that opening right, and not wasting it on a script built for a first-time-cold-called business owner, is a qualifying skill in itself.
Human + AI SDRs can hold that first conversation by text, confirming a landlord prospect’s portfolio size and current coverage situation before a producer’s calendar gets a meeting booked on a call that opens like every other one they have already ignored this month.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- Cognism, State of Cold Calling 2026 report (via Scrap.io)
- REsimpli user data, via Scrap.io (vendor-reported, not independently audited)