The Best Times to Call a Prospect

By Michael Caron, President, Northbound Learning   

I’m often asked “Is there a good time to call prospects?” The quick answer is that any time is a good time as opposed to not making a call at all. As obvious and somewhat sarcastic as that sounds, the biggest challenge most of us have is not making enough calls and I always recommend that the first focus should be on picking up the phone more often. After that, there definitely are times of the day when the chances of connecting to a prospect is higher than others.

A study at M.I.T. attempted to answer this question and although it was based on looking at connecting rates with prospects after they submitted website enquiries, I believe the conclusions extend to typical business-to-business calls as well. What they found was that the beginning and the end of the day delivered greater success. The time block with the greatest chance of connecting to a customer was between 4 & 6 p.m. with the block from 8 to 10 a.m. coming in at a close second. Important decision makers are most often at their desks at these times while their gatekeepers are often not. Before blocking out the 2 hour slot of 4 to 6 p.m. on your agendas, there are some other considerations:

1. How many hours of outbound prospecting activity do you need to hit your sales targets? If you don’t know, find out by doing a funnel analysis. If you don’t know how to do a funnel analysis, join us on our next Power Prospecting free webinar to learn how. Again, the most important point is to make sure that you have enough time set aside to make your minimum number of prospecting actions a reality.

2. When are you best able to make calls? For most people, making calls between 4 & 6 p.m. just isn’t practical. We all have lives outside of our sales role and late afternoon calls just don’t fit sometimes. For this reason, I recommend that calls be made first thing in the morning. Additionally, we are freshest and most energetic in the morning — important when wanting to sound your best. Psychologically, it can be very motivating to get this somewhat unpleasant task off your plate and move on to the rest of your day.

The best days for calling? The study shows that Tuesday to Thursday are the ones to shoot for if you have that option. If you can’t get the required number of calls made on those days only, however, you may need to include Monday and Fridays.

Using these guidelines, you can increase your contact rates but I strongly caution you to keep one thing in mind: A call made on a Monday after lunch is still better than the call that you intend to make on Thursday morning but don’t get around to!