The Worst Time to Schedule Your Sales Calls, According to New Data
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It was Monday, May 6, 2013. My first day as a sales rep at insidesales.com.
I sat spellbound in an onboarding class watching the company’s founder – Ken Krogue – present some compelling research on lead management. He talked about how leads are more likely to answer the phone and agree to a demo on certain days of the week and at certain times of the day. He also discussed that if you call a web lead within 5 minutes, they are 100x more likely to pick up the phone (!).
The Best and Worst Times of Day to Schedule Your Sales Calls & Demos
Surprisingly, afternoons are a better time to schedule your sales calls than mornings in terms of preventing no-shows and optimizing your hold-rates: If you would have asked me to guess the best time to schedule sales calls before I saw this data, I would have said between 8 am and 11 am – when people are most “fresh.” Turns out, I would’ve been wrong. In hindsight, this makes sense. People are just getting into the office and may be pulled in several different directions by their bosses, forcing them to skip out on your meeting or call. If you schedule your sales call for 4 pm compared to 8 am, your odds are 30% greater that the prospect will show up to the meeting.Misdirected Effort
This data becomes more interesting when we take a look at what times salespeople most often schedule their calls:
The Best and Worst Days of the Week to Schedule Your Sales Calls and Demos
There was significantly less variation on no-show rates by day of the week compared to the time of day data we just covered. But it’s still worth noting…
Stay Tuned For More
That’s all the data I have for now folks. I hope you’ll find this useful when battling “no-shows.” If you liked this data, check out the rest of our research by heading over to our sales research library. Help your reps nail their scheduled sales calls using Gong.io – the #1 conversation intelligence platform for sales. Request a demo today. If you liked this article you may also be interested in:- How to start a sales call – Open Every Sales Call In a Way That Engages the Brain
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