The best time to call B2B prospects is between 9am and 6pm their time.
Whoa, hold on a second – that can’t be right!!!
The conventional wisdom is that decision-makers are in meetings all day so the best hours to call are 8-9am when they are prepping and 6p-7p when they are wrapping up.
I thought the same thing until I looked at the data. We looked at 309,104 calls made by SalesLoft customers to their prospects. Figure 1 shows what we found by the recipient time of day
The data shows conclusively that the connect rate is actually lower outside of standard business hours. Why? My hypothesis is that executives use 8a-9a and 6p-7p as quiet focus time and are actually more wary of picking the phone than usual.
Let’s look at this from another angle – that of the caller (the rep).
If reps only called people in the same time zone, then the result should be more or less identical to Figure 1. However, reps call across time zones (for better or worse). So, think about a rep based on the East Coast of the US calling in North America. What would you expect to see?
Well, prospects in the Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones would start picking up at low rates through noon where you’d expect a peak. Then, connect rates would be stable throughout the day until 6pm when the East Coast prospects go offline. Figure 2 confirms this pattern (based on a subset of the data for East Coast-based callers).
The bottom line:
For reps calling across multiple time zones, the best hour to call is 12p-1p. However, the difference is not all that big so the best advice is to ignore “the best time to call” and just call.