This assumes it's a frictionless commodity. I want a pizza, I buy a pizza. I'm not interested in cold calls selling me pizza because if I wanted one, I would've already gone to the pizza shop down the road.
However, not everything is like this. Jobs, for example, are the opposite extreme. If someone cold-calls me asking me a job interview, well, this actually happened (not via a phone call) and led to me moving halfway around the world and having to learn a second language. Did I get scammed? Ich denke nicht.
In the realm of actual products, there are might be things you think about buying for a long time, and then eventually you see a good deal and buy it. Cold calls may help you find a good deal (I doubt it now - but back in the era when they weren't just spam) and then you may buy it.
There's also just advertising, especially for B2B where everything is more opaque. I have no idea where to get advanced Ethernet switch ASICs ("merchant silicon" as they call it) and you can't even Google it because the information isn't public. If I was a networking company and some switch ASIC company called me to tell me they make switch ASICs and here's our product selection guide, that would actually be welcome information. (I'm not one, but let's imagine I was.)
If you manage to end it in 3-8 seconds they can do 360 such calls in an hour. If the guy costs $12 per hour that works out to little over 3 cent.
And then, 20 months later a % of the "fuck off, leave me alone" guys need the product and remember how polite the call was. These usually do a good bit of research. They clearly call for information. If the price is good and they live 3 blocks away there are good odds they let you mow their lawn.
There is nothing super wrong with this, I mean, sales is necessary evil of doing business. necessary, because the whole point is to sell the thing, and evil, because you are coercing someone to do something they otherwise would not have done. But I think there is a healthy ratio here, and I try to make a point(often failing for the reason in the previous paragraph) to avoid products that lean too heavily on the unhealthy side of that ratio. those companies that believe sales is more important than the product.
If there are millions of prospects and you cant filter by anything the point is to figure out that they don't need or want your product. Do it fast and politely.
Or not even that, the actual goal is to put in the calls without the negative psychological effect of mass rejection.
Arguably, you can start calling before writing the business plan when you only have a half finished idea. If you find just one prospect who says your product would be a wonderful thing have them be more specific. Like that it is much easier to stay motivated. Rejection is much harder if you are deeply invested, wrote the plan, wrote the code, found investors, hired employees.
While cold calling is heavily associated with shit products that doesn't mean your product is shit the moment you pick up the phone. Or maybe it is and you need to be told what is wrong with it repeatedly. You need to be talking with people who've made widgets for decades, they know their stuff.
Who knows, maybe you don't even need an idea. If you just call 1000 people in the funeral sector they can tell you what software they need. Then try weddings, laundromats, plumbers etc
Ask the dumb questions, what would be the right time to call someone in the $sectorName sector? What is their software budget? What are the repetitive administrative tasks? Is the sector patient and polite or do they tell you to fuck off and hang up?
Customers often do not know that products or even product categories exist and need to be informed about them.
As an example, a pest control company canvassed one of my friends' cul-de-sacs and essentially threatened to send all the pests into his house by poisoning them and repelling them from all the neighbors. If you have a pest problem exclusion is usually cheaper and better than poison or repellent. My wife paid for trapping and control on her house for years and then I went around over the course of a couple of weeks and closed the gaps in her siding that were added by telecommunications companies like Verizon and AT&T and Comcast over the years. Mysteriously the pest problem went away after that.
So it's not always the case that the product being advertised is a net positive. Often it's net neutral or net negative. But the advertiser sure wants you to do it anyway.
I don't know how many times I have told my own mother not to pick up the phone. At best she knows at worst she says she's knows it's a scam but "just wants to see who it is". At least she knows not to press 1 although "why what would it do?" often comes up. She has no credit card or Internet so VISA and Amazon scams are obviously fake. Of the calls to her land line phone nearly 100% are scam calls.
Even my aunt who knows better called to ask my mother why [large company] needed her to get gift cards and not tell the police. The pressure of authority is strong for older people they can't fathom someone would dare impersonate police.
Don't fall for your elderly relatives behaviour if they seems smart and not in any way gullible they still may be. It's shocking how easily some people are fooled even ones you think would never fall for such scams.
If I actually needed what the salesman was selling, I would have bought it already myself. This is true for everything I've ever purchased. The fact that they have to push it on me proves that it's negative-EV and I have no problem just hanging up or closing the door. I guess not everyone finds this easy.