The Best Time to Cold Call in 2024

After over ten years in sales and marketing, I know the value of cold calling. But predicting the best time to cold call prospects isn’t easy.

I’ve had to change up my tactics over the past few years, because let’s face it, we’ve all changed how — and where — many of us work and engage with potential clients. Additional factors like remote global teams, flexible work locations, and wide-ranging schedules make it even more difficult to pinpoint cold-calling trends.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible! I’ve got some great cold calling tips and research for boosting your cold calling success, even in 2024. Let’s dive in.

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A recent study by CallHippo analyzed over 15,000 sales calls to determine the days in which cold calls are more likely to connect. According to the study, the best day of the week for sales calls was Wednesday, by a long shot.

On average, sales reps were able to strike up conversations in 195 of the calls made on Wednesday first-try, compared to only 90 of the calls on Monday and a paltry 60 calls placed on Friday.

If you like percentages, this means that 33.9% of calls placed on Wednesday connected, while only 15.7% of calls on Monday and 10.4% of the calls made on Friday made it through.

That makes Monday and Friday the worst days to reach your target market.

And when you think about it, the results make sense. On Monday, I’m usually still getting ready for the work week ahead, so reaching me won’t be as easy. Likewise, by Friday afternoon, I know tons of people who are just looking forward to the weekend and can’t (or don’t want to, honestly) focus on closing a deal.

But by the middle of the week, most people (including me) have had enough time to settle into the week’s work and take care of their pressing needs, so a cold call would be much less likely to feel like an interruption.

The Best Time of Day for Sales Calls

We now know Wednesday is the sweet spot where your calls are more likely to get through on the first try. But if you want to increase the odds of that happening, you’ll also want to consider the time at which you’re making the call.

The same study conducted by CallHippo suggests the best times to cold call are 10–11 AM and 4–5 PM. At first, that may seem counterintuitive. After all, you’d either expect someone to be preparing for lunch or leaving work during these hours.

But based on my experience, these are the exact reasons why these are the best times of the day to get a successful cold call.

Just think about your typical office day. In most cases, I’m wrapping up tasks in the late morning, right before lunch, which means I’m available and more willing to take a sales call than earlier in the day when I’m just starting to tackle the morning’s must-do tasks.

After lunch, things get busy again, and I don’t really have much time to spare until the late afternoon when my workday is pretty much over or I leave the office altogether. So, it’s harder to pick up the phone.

Cassie Fields, president of AutoLeap, a Canadian auto software company, likes to refer to these times as “shoulders.”

She states, “My connect rate was always highest during these times of the day. If you think about a typical executive’s workday, they don’t start meetings until after 10 AM, and they typically end meetings by 4 PM.”

The Worst Time of Day for Sales Calls

If there’s a best time for cold calls, there’s also a worst time to make a sales call.

Like me, you probably aren’t surprised at all to see that 7 AM is the worst time to connect with a prospect, according to CallHippo. Compared to the 3,000+ first-attempt conversations achieved at 4–5 PM, calls at 7 AM. only managed to spike first-attempt conversations with 500 people.

Making a cold call before 10 AM is tricky. You don’t know whether prospects are ready, and more importantly, willing, to answer. And that’s putting aside the fact that so many of us are still working remotely, making work schedules and start times more unpredictable.

I’ve also learned that calling super early or really late doesn’t mean I’ll actually reach a decision-maker either. While 64% of CEOs wake up before 6 AM, they tend to wake up early to focus on their work without any distractions.

That said, there’s one big exception to these early morning calls — being in a different time zone than your prospects. For example, if I’m staying in Los Angeles and intend on reaching out to someone in Boston, my 7 AM would be 10 AM on the East Coast. So, reaching out is worth a shot even if it cuts into my beauty sleep from time to time.

As any good sales person will tell you, to make effective cold calls, you’ll have to do more than call any random phone number on a Wednesday at 4 PM.

Here are a few things you can account for when preparing and iterating on your cold call strategy.

Mind your response time.

If you don’t follow up with new leads within the first hour of qualifying them, you could be missing out on successful sales.

Now, first-hour follow-ups aren‘t as common of a practice as you may think, at least judging from Revenuehero’s most recent study. In it, the company requested demos from 1,000 B2B websites, and the results were somewhat worrying.

Out of the 1,000 requests, Revenuehero received only 365 responses. That means a whopping 63.5% of the demo requests fell into the void. And out of the companies that responded, 162 of them took a day, week, or even more than a week to respond. Talk about letting a hot lead cool off.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom, as 203 of the companies in the same group responded within the hour. And if you ask me, that’s the category you want to fall into.

After all, 78% of buyers purchase from the first company to respond to their inquiry, meaning the faster you reach out to an inbound lead, the better.

Personally, I always try to follow up with new leads within the first hour they become qualified. Otherwise, I know I could be leaving valuable opportunities on the table.

Take it from Marty Bauer, director of sales at Omnisend, who takes a similar stance.

“If someone is showing intent or submits a lead form on your channels, speed is critical. The best time to contact them is now because that’s when the customer has a need and is attentive to your solution. If you wait until 8 AM or 2PM the next day — you have likely missed the best window of opportunity.”

The moral of this story? When in doubt, call immediately.

Be persistent.

Do you quit calling a lead after your second or third voicemail? If so, you might be selling yourself short. Sometimes, it really does pay to keep trying.

CallHippo found that 40% of sales reps give up on a prospect after the first call, even though it often takes up to six follow-up phone calls before you convert a lead.

I don’t use only calls in my sales process either. I always take advantage of multiple touchpoints and channels. HubSpot found that 68% of sales professionals used three or more channels to close their sales too, so I’m in good company.

Generally, I like to follow up calls with an email, and I even use email as part of my cold outreach efforts if reaching the lead via phone proves difficult.

Use the right tools.

Using the right tools can definitely help you close sales, but finding the right balance with your software stack can take time.

HubSpot found that 45% of sales reps felt overwhelmed by the number of tools in their tech stack. And it’s not hard to see why, either. I frequently use multiple email accounts, marketing tools, sales platforms, social media, and a CRM on any given day.

While I find my CRM to be vital for sales activities — and 91% of sales professionals agree with that sentiment — that doesn’t change the fact that most of my peers often deal with a lengthy list of non-integrated tools to get the job done.

My honest thoughts? Sales reps should leverage software with AI.

Using software that provides AI-driven insights is an excellent way to cut down the amount of work and planning you have to do.

And that’s why more and more salespeople are hopping on the AI trend — at least based on the results of the survey driving HubSpot’s latest Sales Trends Report.

Here are how some of the ways 1,477 sales professionals are using AI today:

• 83% of sellers said AI was effective at recognizing and responding to buyer sentiment.
• 17% of sales reps use AI to help them pick the best time to upsell.
• 26% of sales reps use AI to help pinpoint their timing for cross-selling.

I also use AI for everyday tasks, like drafting emails or getting the timing for sales calls right. And considering HubSpot’s report also found that AI is making it easier for customers to help themselves, there’s no doubt reps will find more creative uses for AI in sales as their role adapts to the current market.

Increase your close rate with scripts.

HubSpot found 20% of sales people rely on call scripts to help them with their sales process. I know scripts have definitely helped my success rate, and I always like to have at least two or three options nearby to fall back on.

What’s more, 15% of the sales pros surveyed by HubSpot said that call scripts are one of their most effective strategies for helping them close deals.

I’ve found that creating scripts that allow for a variety of responses often makes it easier to talk with prospects. Plus, if I have a few paths laid out right in front of me, it’s easier to figure out how to redirect them without turning them away if one solution doesn’t work for their needs.

If you need a starting point for a cold call script, check out HubSpot’s cold call script template.

With our Sales Trends Report, HubSpot recently released insights worth keeping in mind as sales professionals revise their cold call and sales strategies for 2024 and beyond.

Here are a couple of highlights I think will motivate sales reps to keep investing time and effort into cold calling.

First, let’s look at how cold calling stacks up to other channels. HubSpot asked sales pros what channels they tend to use for cold outreach.

And although the survey allowed participants to select multiple channels, phone calls still came on top as the preferred method, with 38% of the surveyed sales pros favoring this channel. Email (36%) and social media (34%) were the next two on the list.

These results show that much like me, sales pros are keen on using a multichannel approach. That said, I know plenty of salespeople who prefer sending emails over making a phone call. But while I’d rather skip working on my opening lines most days, it’s also important to look at what’s most effective at converting leads.

When it came down to the effectiveness of these channels according to sales pros, the numbers weren’t much different. Up to 37% of all sales reps reported that phone calls are the most effective channels for cold outreach. Conversely, 23% said email was most effective, and 30% said social media worked best.

The takeaway? Sales teams should still focus on cold calls as part of their outreach. Email, in particular, has a wide gap between popularity and conversion rate, so while I might prefer to send out a few dozen emails, deep down I know putting in that effort and making a call is much more likely to work.

Choosing the Best Time to Cold Call

Ultimately, picking the right time to make your sales calls is essential to sales success. I’ve been working on lead generation and cold calling for over a decade now, and even then, when I get in a rut, I try changing the time or day I make most of my cold calls. Alternatively, I ask a colleague to take a look at the script I’ve been working from to see if there are any changes they’d make to it.

Test these approaches and adopt the ones that work for you. You might be surprised to find how many more prospects you can reach with a few simple tweaks.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in September 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.