My favorite sales blog is gong.io - they ran hundreds of thousands of sales calls through voice recognition to see what really works, and there are a ton of gold nuggets there, just search cold calling. Some of the my favorite cold calling advice: Opening with "How have you been?", followed by "the REASON for my call..."

Also, from my own experience, even when you get a hard No, you can buy one last question with "Out of curiosity..."

There's no replacement for just diving into the dials though. Set yourself a solid target like 300 dials a week and focus on building relationships with individuals and partnerships with companies. Learn the difference between a transactional and consultative sales approach.