Phil Lauterjung

There are plenty of theories about this topic and much of it is wrong.  That is if you accept the findings of a study done by MIT (the brainiac university) and InsideSales.com.  They actually had a professor (Dr. James Oldroyd) with a PhD head the study, so I’m guessing that might have a little credibility with you.

They examined 3 years of data across six companies that generate and respond to web leads, from over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand phone call attempts.

They focused on one question for this study:

When should companies call web-generated leads for optimal contact and qualification ratios?

I think you will find their data to be very interesting, and hopefully helpful to your own sales efforts.

Day of the Week:

The first question was to see if there is a best day of the week to call to get the best contact and qualification ratios.

Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to call to make contact with a lead. In fact, Thursday is a 49.7% better day to call than the worst day, Tuesday.

Wednesdays and Thursdays are also the best days to call to qualify leads. Wednesday was the top day and was 24.9% better than the worst day, which was Friday.

Time of Day:

The next question was to see if there is a better time of day to call to get optimal contact and qualification ratios. They used the same definition of terms for call (attempt), contact, and qualify.

Here is what they found:

4 to 6pm is the best time to call to make contact with a lead. It is 114% better than calling at 11 to 12am, right before lunch. (They did not feel 7-8am was a standard work hour.)

8-9am and 4-5pm are the best times to call to qualify a lead. 8-9am is 164% better than calling at 1-2pm, right after lunch. That’s a big difference! (After 6pm is not a standard work hour.)

Apparently no one likes to make decisions right after lunch.

Response Time Analysis by Hours:

Here’s where it gets very interesting, probably uncomfortable for some of you.  Day of week and time of day were found to be statistically significant variables in contacting and qualifying leads, but the significance of data they analyzed around response time dwarfed them both.

The odds of calling to qualify a lead decreases by over 6 times in the first hour.

This is very interesting, but more interesting, and something they weren’t expecting, was a statistically significant effect Dr. Oldroyd found in the data that shows that:

After 20 hours every additional dial your salespeople make actually hurts your ability to make contact to qualify a lead.

This raises some very interesting questions.  If you have outside sales reps and they are the ones you’re depending on to follow up leads, will they always be able to respond in the first hour?  Probably not.  [Note - the study was done with inside sales people, not outside.]

These results would indicate that web leads should be followed up by well trained inside personnel, and done within the first hour.  It also begs the question, if the trend toward more companies using inside sales reps continues does that mean that outside sales people are going the way of the dinosaurs?  What’s your take on this?

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