Cold calling for business brokers

Alba puts a trained caller on the phone to business owners in your territory, five days a week, to start the conversation about what their company is worth and when they might sell. You get the owners who want to talk. Your advisors keep the valuation and the deal.

One managed caller on the Growth plan is $2,006 a month equivalent on quarterly prepay ($6,018 every three months), or $2,367.08 on monthly flexible billing, plus $1,500 setup once. Caller, parallel dialer and data are all in that number.

The owner answers their own phone. That is the whole game.

A business broker is not selling to a buying committee. The person you need is the owner of a company doing somewhere between one and twenty million a year, and at that size the owner very often picks up the main line themselves, especially early in the morning before the staff are in.

That owner has heard from every private equity scout, every roll-up and every factoring company. The call that works is not a pitch for a listing. It is a reason to think about value and timing on their own terms: what buyers look at, what raises the multiple, what lowers it, and what happens to tax and retirement when they finally sell.

So the caller asks for the owner by name, says plainly who the call is from, and offers something the owner can say yes to without committing to sell anything.

Who the caller asks for

• Owner
• Founder
• President
• CEO of an owner-operated company
• Managing partner

Regional lists beat national ones. We measured it.

On our business-broker engagement, the same caller worked three lists in the same weeks. The list built around the brokerage's home metro answered 13.4% of dials. A wider regional list answered 9.1%. A national list answered 5.5%.

The reason is simple. A local owner recognises the area code, may know the brokerage by name, and can picture sitting down with an advisor in their own city. So we build your list around the markets your advisors can actually serve, filter for owner titles and company size, and exclude anything the brokerage already has in its pipeline or has asked us not to call.

The opener we used: an invitation, not a listing pitch

The script that carried this engagement invited owners to an evening exit-planning dinner hosted by the brokerage, with a business-value speaker and a tax and retirement advisor. The caller named both, said what each would cover, and said a spouse, partner or trusted advisor was welcome. The point was that nothing about the evening asked them to list.

Owners who could not make the date were offered a one-to-one valuation conversation with an advisor instead. Both paths were written into the call card before the first dial, so the caller never improvised the offer.

One engagement, one caller, to 30 September 2026

Proof tier 2: conversations measured on a live engagement. Updated 2026-09-30.

dials

7,962

unique owners on the list

6,100

answered

702

conversations over 60 seconds

303

These are the dialer's own numbers for one US business brokerage, one caller, from the start of the engagement to 30 September 2026. Calls made from the same seat for Alba's own campaigns are excluded.

The blended answer rate sits below the 16.7% across our wider dial study. The national list is the most likely drag, which is why the list section above exists.

What 98,518 of our own dials say about timing

Owner-operators are the reason the 8am hour matters so much here: before the office opens, the owner is the one who picks up.

Across every engagement in the study (18 May to 11 August 2026), 16.7% of dials reached a person. At 8am, local time it was 33.3%; at 4pm, local time, 7.8%. Wednesday reached 23.7% against 6.0% on Monday. These are our aggregate numbers, not a figure for this industry.

We make the calls. You take the conversations.

1. Step 1

   Scope

   A twenty-minute call with Scott on your buyer, your offer and the list. You leave with a written scope and the exact price.

2. Step 2

   Script and list

   We write the call card from your offer and build the list. You approve both before a single dial.

3. Step 3

   Calling

   A named caller in Cairo dials your market on local US numbers with a parallel dialer that a human starts. Calls over sixty seconds are recorded.

4. Step 4

   Report

   Every Friday you get dials, connects and conversations, and the calls worth hearing. Interested prospects go straight to your team.

One caller to start. Add seats when the numbers justify it.

One managed caller on the Growth plan is $2,006 a month equivalent on quarterly prepay ($6,018 every three months), or $2,367.08 on monthly flexible billing, plus $1,500 setup once. Caller, parallel dialer and data are all in that number. No meeting, pipeline or revenue guarantee: results depend on your offer, your market and your follow-up.

Other buyers we call for

• Schools and districts
• Past-customer reactivation
• Outsourced cold calling