How many calls should a new cold caller expect to be answered?

On our floor a person answered about 7 calls in 100. A first call to a lead got a person 6.2% of the time. A new caller who expects one conversation in fifteen calls will not think something is wrong in the first week.

What should you measure in a new cold caller's first two weeks?

People reached out of every 100 leads, and the share of leads that have had at least two calls. Dials and the dialer's own answered figure both mislead: our dialer said 68% of calls were answered when a person had answered 7%.

A new cold caller's first two weeks, on one page

Q: How many times should a new caller ring each lead?

Four times over about ten days, then once more a month later. The second, third and fourth calls reached a person as often as the first: 6.4%, 5.5% and 6.9% against 6.2%. From the fifth call it fell to 3.4%.

This is the page we’d hand someone on their first day of cold calling. It’s short on purpose. Every number comes from over 20,000 of our own calls to US business owners in the past three months, counted from the transcripts.

What to expect

A person picks up about 6 or 7 calls in 100. That’s normal, and it doesn’t mean the list is bad or the caller is doing something wrong.

The hour barely matters. From 9am to 5pm a person answered between 5.7% and 7.0% of our calls in every hour. Friday was our best day and Saturday our worst.

Almost nobody calls back. About 3 in 100 of the leads we called ever rang us back, and half of those did it within the hour.

The four rules

1. Call every lead four times. The second, third and fourth calls reached a person as often as the first.

Call to the lead	A person answered
1st	6.2%
2nd	6.4%
3rd	5.5%
4th	6.9%
5th and later	3.4%

Calling back took us from 6.2% of leads reached to 10.7%. That’s 73% more people from the same list.

2. Start each day with yesterday’s no-answers. When we checked, more than half our leads had been called once and never again. Nobody chose that. New leads were always on top.

3. Try every number on the lead. More than one in five of the people we reached answered on a second or later number.

4. Don’t redial straight away. Calls placed within five minutes of the last one did worst, at 5.0%. A lead we couldn’t reach three weeks or more ago answered 7.6% of the time, so an old list of no-answers is worth another pass.

The two weeks

When	What
Day 1	Call. No answer, try the lead’s other numbers.
Day 1 or 2	Second call.
Day 4 or 5	Third call.
Day 8 to 10	Fourth call.
After that	Stop, and put the lead on a no-answer list with the date.
A month later	Run that list once more from the top.

What to count

Count people reached, not calls answered. For the same calls, our dialer said 68% were answered and a person had answered 7%. The rest was voicemail and the phone’s call screening, the one that asks for your name and why you’re calling. That takes 40 to 50 seconds, so it looks like a short conversation.

For a new caller, two numbers are enough in the first two weeks:

people reached out of every 100 leads
the share of leads that have had at least two calls

If the second number is low, the first one will be too, whatever the script is.

Where the numbers come from

Our own floor: US business owners, called during working hours. Consumer lists will differ on the hours, and probably not on the callbacks. The full write-ups are how many times to call a lead and the best time to cold call business owners.

We built TalaLevel, a CRM with the dialer and texting inside it, around these numbers. You don’t need it to use anything on this page.

A new cold caller’s first two weeks, on one page