Kunnect Nation,

I wasn’t always a “dialer” guy. In my previous life, I used to manage the leads for a small telemarketing company. Some of the basic principles I learned then, albeit we were dialing manually at the time, still apply today in the dialer world. Here are some pointers:

1. We added a Sunday evening shift and canceled our Friday evening shift. The people we did reach on Fridays were never interested in talking to us. Also, our agents appreciated being off on Fridays. Sunday evening calls worked out quite well.

2. We would call all our AM (answering machine) leads on the weekend shifts. We never tried fresh leads on the weekends. We were able to finally reach those people that worked during the week, and keep more fresh leads for the weekdays.

3. Now don’t laugh…this used to work quite well. We took a copy of the USA Today and looked at the country’s weather map. Would would target areas where it was raining (or snowing) in the hopes that more people would be home during the day.

4. Lastly, we realized that most people were home from 9am to 11am and after 4pm duing the day. As we would be calling into all time zones, we would cycle through them with the aforementioned schedule in mind. This way, where ever we were calling, it was morning in that time zone (i.e. calling at 1pm EST, it was 10am PST). This helped avoid afternoon slowness.

If you have some ideas of your own you want to share, just drop me an email at fred@kunnect.com. I’d love to hear them.

Fred Cote