Every executive reading this has a communication stack: email, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, LinkedIn messages, Zoom invites. What almost none of them have is a daily phone call.
Americans send more than 2 trillion text messages annually. US smartphone users communicate via text at a rate five times greater than voice calls. In financial services and institutional investing, where relationship capital is the actual product, this trend represents a concerning gap that the few who close it will exploit for years. The gap is not technical. It is behavioral, even though the data suggests things are changing for the better. And behavioral gaps are the ones that compound.
Think about the last time someone called you, not to schedule, not to follow up on a thread, just to talk. It was probably unusual enough that you remember it. That unusualness is the point. In a sea of typed messages, a voice is a warm signal. I even enjoyed the refund call I had with a Costco agent a few days ago, as I learned that Alaska had 22 feet of snow, and exchanged the type of small talk Italians do all the time. That call landed at the neurological level before the rational one (the refund). People trust voices. They have for 200,000 years.
Mark Cuban has understood this since age 12. Growing up in Pittsburgh, he sold garbage bags door to door, built a personal delivery relationship with every client, and gave out his phone number as the core of his pitch. When he bought the Dallas Mavericks in 2000, he did not hire a consultant. He sat in the sales bullpen and made cold calls himself. One year later, the worst franchise in professional sports was climbing the ticket sales rankings. He did not transform the team. He transformed the relationship between the organization and its customers, one voice call at a time.
The mechanism is the same in business. Analysts, investors, and Ceo who call, who use their voice instead of composing another carefully worded message, build something that digital communication cannot replicate: trust at speed. A phone call changes the relationship timeline. It communicates availability, confidence, and genuine interest in a way that no platform can create. When a manager calls a client on a slow Tuesday with nothing to ask or nothing to sell, they are making a “deposit” in their saving accounts. When the they need a quick delivery, a hand solving a client’s issue, a conversation, that deposit is what gets the call answered on the first ring.
The Italian Advantage concept behind this is La Stretta di Mano, the handshake economy. Deals made in person, or voice to voice, carry a different weight than digital commitments. They carry character and they tend to last. In institutional relationships, that character premium is not sentimental. It is commercial. The supplier who picks up the phone for you when you are in trouble is the one you called on a random Tuesday just to check in. The executive who calls to congratulate a client on a public win, before any agenda is on the table, is the one who gets the first conversation when that client has a service to sell.
It may be a bit nostalgic, but I think this is a winning strategy. The market rewards scarcity. Human communication and handshake are as scarse as ever. Everyone is optimizing the same channels, posting on the same platforms, and composing the same outreach templates, the phone call is underpriced attention. It requires discomfort. In fact it is really difficult toc call, and onece we do it, we often hope that nobody picks up. Making a call requires real time. It cannot be scheduled two weeks out without losing its spontaneous charge. That is exactly why it works.
In leadership, in business development, in investor relations, the marginal call made to someone who did not expect it generates a return that no email sequence can match. The return is not always immediate. Relationship capital rarely is. But it compounds. And at the leadership level, compounding relationships are the only ones that matter.
Start with one call a day. Not a video meeting. Not a scheduled check-in. Not a voice message saying I was thinking of you. A call. For a hello, for advice, to share intelligence, to congratulate someone on something you read this morning. Do it for 30 days and map the change in your relationship temperature across the people you reach. The results will surprise you. The rooms that open will not.
Make the call. It is the highest-ROI move on your desk. And it is the one your competitors have stopped making.