Sapporo January: A 5-Day Record of Cold Calling

Seven in the morning on Monday, inside the Namboku subway line, I shoved my hands into my coat pockets and mentally ran through the day's call list. It was still dark outside the window, and the cold air rising from the platform seeped into the car. In January, Sapporo hovers around minus ten degrees every day. The reason I'd resolved to spend a week pulling out my phone in this cold and calling strangers was the year-end performance review. My Q4 numbers had fallen short of target, and I couldn't just let the first week of January slip by.

Monday. 22 calls, 3 actual conversations

I made 22 calls from 9 a.m. to lunch. Most ended with no answer or "The person in charge isn't at their desk." Only 3 turned into real conversations, and in one of them I heard the words "Send me some materials." That was it for Monday. Eating a nikuman from the convenience store near the office at lunch, I noticed my voice had been getting a little quieter with each rejection. I decided to consciously take a three-second exhale before the next call and raise the tone of my opening line by a half step.

In the afternoon, whether that small adjustment worked or I was just lucky, I managed to book 2 meetings. On my way home, walking through the snowy streets near Susukino Station, my shoes soaking through, I felt strangely good.

Tuesday, Wednesday. Practising endurance with silence

Tuesday was the worst. I made over 30 calls and booked zero meetings. During one call, the other person asked, "So what exactly do you want?" My mind went blank for about two seconds. I had a prepared script, but that question came from an angle the script didn't cover. I ended up just saying "Thank you for your time" and hung up.

That night, back home, I did a 10-minute breathing meditation on a mindfulness app. It's become part of my routine lately. As I sat with my eyes closed, that blank moment from the day came back to me. What I had been afraid of wasn't rejection. It was silence. That empty two-second space while the other person waited. I needed to practise not running from it.

Wednesday. I consciously endured the silence. When the other person stopped talking, I didn't rush to fill the gap. I waited one, two seconds. Surprisingly, after that brief pause, twice the other person went on to share more about their situation first. Because I wasn't talking, they filled the empty space themselves. Wednesday: 1 meeting, 1 quote request.

Thursday. A blizzard and an unexpected conversation

Thursday morning, a heavy snow warning was issued for Sapporo. On the way to work, passing in front of Odori Park, visibility was less than three metres. When I arrived at the office, it took five minutes just to brush the snow off my coat. I expected the people on the other end of the line would be feeling flat on a day like this, but it was the opposite. One contact who picked up said, "You made it to work in this snow? Me too, ha ha," and starting with the weather, the conversation flowed naturally from there. A meeting was set for the following Tuesday.

My takeaway: in B2B cold calling, when you have a shared context, the walls come down. The most ordinary topic (weather) becomes a powerful icebreaker in January in Sapporo. Warming my hands around a 500-yen can of coffee from a vending machine, I jotted down "leverage shared context" in my notebook.

In the afternoon, I sent follow-up emails to 2 existing leads and made 15 more new calls. In one of them, I got the response: "We don't have the budget right now, but contact us again in April." That kind of answer is a win too. I gained timing information.

Friday. Wrapping up

Friday, I spent more time organising than calling. I transferred the week's call records, response patterns, and booked meetings into a spreadsheet and planned next week's actions. Over the five days, I made roughly 120 calls in total. 4 confirmed meetings, 2 quote requests, 1 lead to re-contact in April. The numbers alone aren't impressive. But the me on Monday and the me on Friday felt different when picking up the phone.

The biggest change was my attitude towards silence. Early in the week, I read the other person's silence as rejection. By the latter half, I came to sense that empty space could mean they were thinking. I didn't learn this from a book. I experienced it firsthand in Wednesday's calls, and it stayed with me as a physical sensation.

Friday evening, after work, I ate a bowl of miso ramen at the shop near my apartment. 850 yen. The broth was hot, it was still cold outside, and next week I'd have to pick up the phone again. That's my January.