Is There a Cold Calling Sweet Spot? (Money Monday)

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0:48This is Jeb Blunt and it's Money Monday on the Sales Gravy Podcast.

1:04All right. It is Monday, the most important day of the week, and I'm here to help get you fired up and focused because when you start your week strong, you end your week strong. And I love meeting you. I love my podcast listeners and the fans of my books. This morning, getting on an airplane, I ran into a young lady who'd been reading fanatical prospecting, and we got a few minutes to chat. And one of my favorite places to meet you is at the Outbound Conference. And if you've never been to the Outbound Conference, you really owe it to yourself to go because Outbound is the world's biggest, baddest sales and leadership training conference.

1:35And it's truly an experience like none other. It's a chance for us to spend time together and for you to network with many of the best minds in modern sales. And I really hope to see you there. So don't wait. Go get your ticket today at outboundconference.com. That's outboundconference.com. Now, when I'm out and about and I run into people in airports or on planes or in trains or when someone hits me up on LinkedIn or I'm at a conference or I'm delivering training, the one question that I get more than any other is what's the best time to cold call? Like, is there an hour when people are more likely to pick up or a day of the week that beats all the others?

2:12And I get this question more than any other from brand new reps and 20 year veterans because they're all seeking the same thing. They're looking for a magic window that makes cold calling easy. When prospects answer happily, say yes without a fight, and book the meetings themselves. And here's the thing. Companies publish reports about cold call timing because it's amazingly good clickbait. Almost anything written about cold calling gets attention because salespeople are always on the lookout for data points that support excuses for not cold calling. And you can almost certainly find a stat that confirms your bias that a particular time of week or day doesn't work for cold calling.

2:52So I'm going to give you the straight picture about all these studies. First, the clearest finding, the one that almost every study agrees on, is that the middle of the week, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, are better than the end of the week, Monday and Friday. ZoomInfo, for example, analyzed 1.4 million outbound sales calls from software SDRs and found that Tuesdays and Wednesdays were the strongest days for booking demos. And almost every report says that Monday and Friday are the weakest days. And it makes sense if you just consider how business people run their weeks. Mondays, they're crazy busy.

3:25And Fridays, they're often out of the office, especially with so many people working from home at the edges of the week. But what you have to understand is that these best time and day edges are often incredibly tiny. For example, one very well-known and clickbait-worthy study found that his very best day for cold calling was barely 1 % better than his worst day. But what that tells you is that the difference between best time of day or best time of week is so small that it really doesn't matter. Now, many B2B sales professionals swear by cold calling on Friday afternoons when gatekeepers are out and decision makers are in a good mood.

4:05And a lot of them will call small businesses on Saturday morning because the owner is usually at their desk. And my personal experience reflects this. I'm a huge fan of late Friday afternoon cold calling blocks because I found that high level decision makers are especially impressed with salespeople who are still grinding it out and working hard on Fridays. But it is the best time of data cold call where these studies really start fighting each other and their arguments fall apart. Frankly, they're all over the board. For example, CallHippo, looking into 52 ,000 calls, said that 4 to 5 p.m. was the very best window for cold calling.

4:41And Cognizm, on the other hand, said it was 10 to 11 a.m. So depending on which report you read, you're going to get early morning, late morning, or late afternoon. And this is the point I want to make. If the smartest data teams in business can't agree on the best time to make a cold call, then is there really a best time to make a cold call? Well, I might have an answer for you. At Sales Gravy, our trainers conduct hundreds of live call blocks on the training floor during the cold calling edge training and fanatical prospecting boot camps. And we do this across a wide cross section of industries and have recorded the numbers for over 20 years.

5:18The pattern never changes. We know with absolute certainty that the sellers we work with connect with more prospects, set more meetings, and perform at a higher level in the mornings between 7am and 10am than they do in the afternoons. And it's not just a little bit better, it is significantly better. So why do we say mornings when so many other people are saying the afternoon? Well, first is a catch in the data that everybody misses. You see, these studies are not measuring morning versus afternoon. they are measuring when salespeople choose to make cold calls. The problem is most salespeople procrastinate because they don't like making cold calls.

5:56So they'll put off prospecting all morning and won't pick up the phone until the afternoon. So the afternoon is where the overwhelming majority of the dials are actually happening. Therefore, the data isn't comparing the same sales rep calling at 8am and then again at 4pm, which by the way is exactly what we study and record during our live call blocks. Instead, it's comparing a nearly empty morning against a jammed afternoon and then crowning the afternoon the winner. The truth is that all these studies are just measuring sales rep behavior, not the efficacy of picking a certain time to make a cold call.

6:34If you follow the logic all the way down, it actually makes the case for mornings even stronger. You see, if the morning looks like a bad time to call on the studies, it's not because prospects won't answer and agree to appointments early. It is because very few salespeople kick off their day with prospecting. The good news for you is that it makes the morning cold call block an open lane. With fewer salespeople fighting for attention in the mornings, it's easier for you to stand out and convert cold calls into appointments. Now, cold calling, hands down, is the most challenging sales activity because it's rejection dense and uncomfortable.

7:11It requires a ton of discipline, confidence, mental resilience, willpower, and energy. So here's a question. When is your confidence and energy at their peak each day? The answer, it's in the morning. Because that's when you feel your best and you perform your best. Your sales day is like working out in the gym. At the beginning of a workout, you move faster, lift heavier weights, and you drive harder. But by the end of a workout, your muscles are fatigued. You're tired. You move slower. And the amount of weight you can lift is much less than when you started your workout. And at the end of your workout, when you're tired, your mind tells you to quit and you want to quit.

7:52And this is why it is a stone cold fact that if you wait until the end of your day, when you're mentally fatigued to cold call, you are far more likely to do so with lower energy and enthusiasm. You will sound less convincing. You are much more likely to give up when you get pushback rather than confidently handling objections. And it is just a fact. It is the truth that in your state of exhaustion and fatigue at the end of your sales day, that you are far more likely to procrastinate and quit and push your cold calling off to the next day. And this is exactly why a confident sales rep calling at a so-called bad time will outperform a fried, exhausted, fatigue sales rep calling at the perfect time every day of the week.

8:35It's also true that your prospects, because they're human, are generally more receptive and open at the beginning of the day than at the end of the day. They're still sitting at their desk settling in. Their coffee's in hand. They're working through emails. And they're doing all this before the meetings and the fire start. But by the afternoon, they're buried with problems and they're often in back-to-back meetings. They're less overwhelmed at the start of the day than at the end, which makes it easier for them to agree to meetings. and at the beginning of the day, they're nicer when they get interrupted.

9:07Your prospects are human just like you. By the end of the day, they're exhausted, overwhelmed with all the alligators they've been fighting and frankly, they're grumpy. And even if you brush away all my arguments and believe that the afternoon from 4 to 5 p.m. is better for cold calling, you cannot ignore the truth that it is not better emotionally for you or your prospects. And this is exactly why the Call Hippo study is so ludicrous. You see, most of what's been written about cold call timing is just confusing noise that provides less than eager to prospect salespeople an easy excuse to put off telephone prospecting until tomorrow or this afternoon or any time other than now.

9:46I've heard every version of cold call timing excuses. You can't call on Mondays because everybody's ramping up for the week. You can't call on Fridays because they're checking out early. You can't call in the morning because they're not settled in yet. You can't call before lunch. You can't call after lunch. You can't call during meetings. You can't call at the end of the day. String all those excuses together and you've talked yourself out of an entire week of prospecting. Then when the pipeline goes dry, you end up like so many other people looking for the secret code that will solve the pipeline problem that you created because you were trying to time your cold calls, which means that you didn't make any cold calls.

10:23So here's the real truth that no one wants to acknowledge because it takes away the excuses. There is no secret cold calling code. There is no timing easy button. Attempting to time your cold calls is a wickedly poor strategy. So forget about trying to time your cold calls and instead commit to a daily first thing in the morning call block. Be consistent and schedule that call block every day. Because consistent every day, every day, every single day cold calling will deliver far better results than perfect timing ever will. Just think about cold calling like investing. The investor who tries to time the market almost always loses to the one who invests the same amount on a set schedule month after month, no matter what the market is doing.

11:08And prospecting is no different. The math is always on the side of the sales pro who prospects consistently every single day. So when people ask me what's the best day to cold call, my answer is every day. And when people ask me the best time to cold call, I say it's at the beginning of the day when you're fresh and you're energized and you're confident or just pick up the phone right now. And when it's the end of the day, when you're tired and you're worn out and all you want to do is quit and go home, remember, always make one more call. This is Jeb Blunt and I'll see you next time on the Sales Gravy Podcast.

11:55See note, some cheddar and a stack of ends. I need a bowl of dough. I don't need no Facebook friends. I need a pack of them snaps, a handful of Fetty Wops, some rubber band on my green backs. Look, doll, don't be playing with my paper. I need every red cent. That's why I brought my little scraper. Money, money, money, money. Take money, money, take money, money, money. Make money, money, make money, money, money. Take money, money, take money.