How Many Times Should You Call Each Sales Lead? Read Our New Call Attempts Study
Here’s what our own Nisheeth Singh had to say about the study:
As you may have read on Lead Critic today, we released our newest research regarding the impact of call frequency on sales lead conversion.
To misquote a famous author: “Elementary, my dear Watson”. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s written works never actually saw this phrase although the first and second parts of the phrase were seen in close association during conversations. But I digress.
As many of you opined above and is the central premise of the paper (found here), sometimes the most obvious and logical actions are never taken by lead buyers. I don’t necessarily understand why they don’t but I do revel in the fact that it means significant upside for those that choose to engage with their leads smartly.
We conducted the study based on several million leads that our clients tried contacting over a period of many months to have as diverse a data set as possible. We studied the effects of multiple call attempts all the way to 20 and I’ve published the entire results of our study below just to whet your intellectual curiosity. Some explanation is in order:
* Column 1 denotes the call attempt
* Column 2 denotes the percentage of ‘Contactable leads’ contacted – this is key to understanding the study and is NOT the same as Contact Rate. This means that the data set excludes any leads that were never contacted. This metric is a percent of the remaining leads in our study which we define as ‘contactable leads’
* Column 3 denotes the percent improvement in the ‘% of Contactable leads contacted’ metric for each successive attempt over the very 1st call attempt
* Column 4 denotes the percent improvement in the ‘% of Contactable leads contacted’ metric for each successive attempt over the preceding call attempt
Contact % of Contactable Improvement Improvement over
Attempt leads contacted over 1st attempt preceding attempt
——————————————————————————
1 39%
2 72% 87% 87%
3 83% 114% 15%
4 88% 128% 6.5%
5 91% 136% 3.4%
6 93% 141% 2.1%
7 95% 145% 1.5%
8 96% 148% 1.1%
9 96% 150% 0.8%
10 97% 151% 0.6%
11 97% 152% 0.5%
12 98% 153% 0.3%
13 98% 154% 0.3%
14 98% 154% 0.3%
15 98% 155% 0.2%
16 99% 155% 0.2%
17 99% 156% 0.2%
18 99% 156% 0.1%
19 99% 156% 0.1%
20 99% 157% 0.1%
As you can see, the benefits of calling start trailing off pretty steeply after the 5th or 6th attempt, we chose to prescribe 6 attempts as the cut-off. I beg to defer with LeadCritic in that this is a very statistically relevant study with a data set this size and of this heterogeneity, at least at a high level. I do agree though that to get maximum benefit from a study like this, one should conduct the same study but specifically for their own sales team to understand the effect of call attempts on their contact rate.
Cheers!
Nisheeth Singh
Director of Strategic Intelligence, Leads360
