What day of the week is best day for prospecting cold calls? What time of the day is best? My recent post titled Pounce, Pause, Nurture or Wait? was focused on the preferred response strategy for followup on a lead generated via the web. Terrific comments are captured on Smashmouth Marketing blog and I recommend you read and catch up with the comments left behind.
Plenty of personal experience and anecdotal data over the years have planted the ideas I have as answers to those questions. Gut feeling only, no empirical data to back that feeling up. When you are preparing and planning your prospecting or cold-calling / FirstCalling activities, wouldn’t it be great to have some hard data to guide you in your efforts? Thanks to a post by John Whattam, Regional Account Executive at Paradigm Learning, I came across a valuable report titled Lead Response Management Study from the Kellogg School of Management and presented by David Elkington, CEO of Insidesales.com and James Oldroyd, PHD Professor at M.I.T.
Here is the summary that John provided:
- Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to call in order to contact (by 49.7% over the worst day) and qualify (by 24.9% over the worst day) leads. Thursday is the best day to contact a lead in order to qualify that lead (by 19.1% better than the worst day).
- 4 to 6pm is the best time to call to make contact with a lead (by 114% over the worst time block). 8-9am and 4-5pm are the best times to call to qualify a lead (by 164% better 1-2pm, the worst time of the day). 4-5pm is the best time to contact a lead to qualify over 11-12am by 109%).
- The odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by over 10 times in the 1st hour. The odds of calling to qualify a lead decrease by over 6 times in the 1st hour. After 20 hours every additional dial your salespeople make actually hurts your ability to make contact to qualify a lead.
- The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times.
If you have an interest and/or responsibility to mazimize the results from leads, you will benefit greatly from this report.
Directly from the report here is an overview of their effort:
“Generally Speaking, the study was focused on identifying WHEN the best time was to efficiently contact web-generated leads, and HOW to generate web leads that qualify and close at optimal rates.”
If you are in sales or marketing, that has got to grab your attention. Here is the link to read/download this report: http://www.leadresponsemanagement.org/images/kellogg_study.pdf
So, read the report and then come back and tell us if you have changed your strategy or approach to following up on leads. Let us know if your experience matches the findings in the report.
Craig Rosenberg’s response is sounding better all the time (frequent occurrence)!