Two calls, Four Calls, Six Calls, A Dozen

Years ago, while I worked in the “boiler room,” I was connected by the auto dialer to a telephone number in Bullhead City, Arizona. The man who answered the phone had the same last name of a local casino that was very near Bullhead City. I used this tidbit of information to dig into a conversation that would get me past the normal twenty seconds of phone time, where rejection seemed to lurk. To my dismay, the pleasant conversation was not enough to provoke the potential customer into setting an appointment for a living trust. I discharged the call on the computer screen by pressing F4, to indicate that the contact was not interested and was now a “dead-lead.” Two months later and regardless that the lead was marked exhausted, I was connected to the same customer. My memory of the peculiar name had reminded me of the first contact with the lead and I excused myself to the customer and discharged the call.

            Why were we calling people who had so clearly asked to not be bothered with free information about living trusts? The answer; our advertising director was a cheapskate and our owner was too lazy to oversee his own interests. This was the beginning of my education on calling leads and the lesson I learned was not to call people who didn’t want to be called. But what about those who did want to be called? How many times should we call them? I can now tell you that the answer is six. Six calls, Monday through Saturday, varied by morning, noon, and evening call times. But why not call two, three, four, or five times?

            I have worked many call campaigns and from my experience the only way to canvas a six day campaign and make sure I am appointment setting and not harassing; is to place two morning, two afternoon and two evening calls. You may be thinking, this is all too methodical or black and white. And you are right, because it has to be methodical and it is black and white. Spending time and money calling people who are not in your specific market is a waste of time. This detracts from contacting new genuine leads. Calling a lead only twice doesn’t take in account of the available schedule of the potential client. Calling the lead only four times can skip vital contact windows like Saturdays and during multiple week night prime-time television commercial breaks. So I shoot for six. However, from my experience and from time to time, if a lead is not reached in a timely manner within six days of receiving the lead; the lead is more susceptible to being contacted by a more attentive agent.

 I am sure there are people who contact leads with a different approach than I do and will call potential clients up to twelve or thirteen times. I see this as either an indecisive lead or a person who is not really interested in the market information I am sharing with them and it too nice to say no. This is a total waste of marketing resources, unless the goal is to chase down clients who won’t returns a weeks’ worth of phone messages about information they actively requested.

In the end its simple, get the lead contacted with a quick and efficient calling campaign and don’t let someone else get them before you do.