Every guide says the same thing: call between 4 and 5pm, and never on a Monday. We wanted our own answer, so we went through over 20,000 of our own calls from the past three months.
The first count said 5pm was the best hour by far. It was wrong.
We had counted any call that ran 30 seconds or more as a conversation. When we read what was on those calls, only about a third had a person on the line. More than four in ten were call screeners, the phone feature that asks you to "record your name and reason for calling" and then never puts you through. That takes 40 to 50 seconds, so it looked like a conversation.
So we counted again from the transcripts, and only counted the calls a person answered.
From 9am to 5pm a person answered between 5.7% and 7.0% of our calls in every hour. It's flat. Lunch isn't worse.
5pm is an ordinary hour, at 6.9%.
Monday is fine, at 6.7%. Monday to Thursday are within a point and a half of each other.
Friday was our best day at 10.4%, and Saturday the worst at 4.4%.
For the same calls, our dialer's own "answered" figure was 68%. A person answered 7%.
What we took from it: the hour matters much less than the advice says, and what you count matters much more. If your connect rate counts anything that picked up, it is mostly counting machines.
The full post has the hour-by-hour table, the charts and what we'd do with it:
https://talalevel.com/blog/best-time-to-cold-call-business-owners/