cold call
1. verb To make an unsolicited phone call or visit to a person or business, usually to sell something. I've never been hung up on so much in my life—these people I'm cold calling just are not interested in my spiel.
2. noun Such a phone call or visit. Time to make cold calls to the people in this building now.
cold call
tv. to call a sales prospect from a list of persons one has never met. Things have to be pretty bad when the senior brokers at a major house have to cold call people to get business.
cold call
A telephone call, most often a sales call, made to someone who is not known to the caller and who is not expecting a call. Often generated by computerized lists of phone numbers, cold calls are considered a major annoyance, so much so that the U.S. government has set up “don’t call” lists to which one may subscribe. The term dates from the second half of the 1900s.