“Success is not final; failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill
That observation was made in the context of war. It applies with remarkable precision to the daily reality of business development.
The courage to continue, in the face of unanswered emails, missed calls, and prospects who seem perpetually unavailable, is genuinely necessary. But there is a prior courage that most people overlook entirely. The courage to be visible before you ever pick up the phone.
The cold call problem #
If the phone is in your toolkit for new business generation, a pure cold call relies on your prospects being in your zone at the time you call them. This is a big ask.
The research confirms how big. The average cold call success rate sat at 2.3% in 2025 according to Cognism’s State of Cold Calling Report. That means roughly 97 calls in every hundred produce nothing, not because the caller lacks skill or persistence, but because most prospects simply aren’t in the right moment for that conversation when the phone rings. leadinfo
This is not a failure of effort. It is a structural problem with pure cold calling that no amount of persistence can fully overcome. The prospect who has never heard of you, encountered your thinking, or registered your name has no frame of reference for the call and no reason to stay on the line beyond politeness.
The courage to continue matters enormously. But it works considerably better from a standing start than from scratch.
The email-first advantage #
So, before calling, email or post some information highlighting how you can help your chosen market and how you can make a difference to your prospects and their businesses.
This single adjustment changes the nature of the call that follows.
The email or mailshot positions you better in your marketplace, gets you remembered, and adds a positive touch. When the call arrives after a prospect has encountered your name, your thinking, or your approach; even briefly, even without responding, something has shifted. Research shows warm introductions are five to ten times more effective than cold outreach at creating meaningful conversations. The gap between a cold call and a warm one is not marginal. It is structural. growleads
Companies that combine cold calling with email and LinkedIn see 28% higher conversion rates than those relying on calling alone. The phone call is not being replaced. It is being prepared for. The email creates the context. The call creates the conversation. leadinfo
Avoid pestering: become well-known #
There is an important distinction at the heart of this approach that is worth stating precisely.
Pestering is contact without value. It is the sixth follow-up that says nothing new, the email that exists only to announce itself, the call that has no genuine curiosity behind it. Pestering tells the prospect that you need something from them. It communicates the transaction before the relationship.
Becoming well-known is something entirely different. It is the consistent, patient, genuinely useful presence that means your name surfaces in a prospect’s mind when a relevant need arises, before you have asked for anything at all.
The route to being well-known in a market is not volume of contact. It is quality and consistency of presence over time. The Hub articles that address challenges your market faces. The LinkedIn posts that share observations from genuine professional experience. The emails that offer something of value before requesting anything in return. The calls that are curious rather than urgent.
“Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.” — Andrew Davis.
That sequence — content, relationship, trust, revenue — is not reversible. The businesses that try to start at revenue and work backwards discover that the foundation simply isn’t there.
The courage the Churchill quote is really describing #
Churchill’s observation is most often read as encouragement to persist through difficulty. And it is that. But there is a deeper reading available.
The courage to continue is specifically the courage to keep going when the results aren’t yet visible. When the email sequence hasn’t produced a response. When the calls haven’t landed. When the content hasn’t generated the engagement you hoped for. When the market hasn’t yet registered that you exist.
This is the period that most marketing campaigns don’t survive, not because the strategy is wrong, but because the timeline is misread. The familiarity that produces a warm call rather than a cold one is built in weeks and months, not in a single campaign. The trust that produces an inbound enquiry rather than an outbound chase is built across dozens of touchpoints, most of which produce no immediate signal that they are working.
The courage to continue is the courage to build something whose results are lagging indicators; things that arrive considerably later than the effort that produced them.
Avoid pestering. Make it your mission to become well-known. Keep carrying on.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbulldomican/
