How Many Seller Conversations It Actually Takes Before Someone Says Yes to an Appointment

The Rigorous Study Nobody Has Repeated Since 2011

Most cold calling statistics circulating online trace back to nothing verifiable. Baylor University’s Keller Center research is a real exception: 50 real estate agents placed 6,264 genuinely cold calls over two weeks of fieldwork in November 2011, with the full call counts disclosed rather than summarized away. It remains the most-cited rigorous academic study of real estate cold calling as of 2026, which says as much about how little has been measured since as it does about the study itself.

That age matters. A study run in 2011, before smartphones fully displaced landlines and before spam-likely flagging existed at all, is describing a calling environment that has shifted in ways the study cannot account for. It is still the best disclosed-methodology data available, which is exactly why it gets cited, but it should be read as a 2011 measurement, not a current one.

Only 28% of Cold Calls Even Get Answered

Before any conversation can happen, a call has to be answered. In the Baylor data, only 28% of the 6,264 calls were, 1,774 calls out of the total. 55% went unanswered entirely, and 17% reached non-working numbers, phone lines that were disconnected, wrong, or otherwise dead on arrival.

That breakdown reframes the whole question. How many conversations does it take already assumes a conversation happened, and on an unsegmented cold list, fewer than 3 in 10 dials clear that first bar at all.

The Real Conversations-to-Appointment Ratio

Of the 6,264 calls placed, only 19 converted into a scheduled appointment. Combining booked appointments with referrals, the study reports one positive outcome per 209 calls placed, roughly 7.5 hours of dialing per outcome at a typical calling pace.

Narrowing the denominator to actual conversations, not total dials, sharpens the number further: 19 appointments out of 1,774 answered calls works out to roughly one booked appointment per 93 real conversations. That arithmetic is not stated directly in the study; it is derived from the study’s own disclosed counts, and it is the number that actually answers how many conversations it takes, as opposed to how many dials.

How That Compares to a General B2B Benchmark

Gong’s 2024 analysis of over 300 million recorded sales calls, spanning industries well beyond real estate, found the average rep converts 4.6% of live connections into a booked meeting, and top-quartile reps convert 16.7%, with an average connect rate of 5.4% and a top-quartile connect rate of 13.3%.

Set against the Baylor study’s roughly 1-in-93 conversation-to-appointment rate, real estate’s cold-calling conversion looks markedly weaker than the general B2B benchmark. The Baylor study’s own list was unsegmented, plain cold dials with no prior qualification, which plausibly explains a meaningful share of that gap: a targeted, pre-qualified list should convert conversations at a rate closer to Gong’s cross-industry figures than to Baylor’s raw cold-list number.

Sizing How Many Conversations a Real Pipeline Needs

Take the Baylor ratio at face value and the math is sobering: roughly 93 real conversations, not dials, for one booked appointment on an unsegmented cold list. Take Gong’s cross-industry benchmark instead and the number drops to somewhere between 6 and 22 conversations per booked meeting, depending on whether a caller is performing at the average or the top quartile.

The gap between those two ranges is the entire argument for working a qualified, pre-screened list instead of a raw cold one: the conversation count needed to reach a yes does not have to sit at the Baylor study’s end of that range. VA Horizon’s trained callers, paired with an in-house SDR qualifying every response that comes back, work toward the tighter end of it.

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.

• Baylor University Keller Center, "Has Cold Calling Gone Cold?"
• Gong, "The Hidden Power of Cold Calling: Insights From 300M Calls"

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