We used to call a lead once, get no answer, and move on to the next new one. Nobody decided that. The old leads just never came back to the top of the list.
So we went through over 20,000 of our own calls from the past three months and looked at each call to a lead we hadn't reached yet.
The first call got a person 6.2% of the time.
The second call got a person 6.4% of the time. A lead who didn't pick up the first time answered the second call just as often as a lead we'd never called.
The third call was 5.5% and the fourth 6.9%. From the fifth call on it dropped to 3.4%.
One call each would have reached 6.2% of our leads. With the calls after that we got to 10.7%. That's 73% more people from the same list, without buying a single new lead.
Four in ten of the people we talked to didn't answer the first time we called.
Then the part that hurt. More than half of our leads had been given exactly one call that nobody answered, and we never called them again.
We also looked for the right gap between calls and didn't find one. A lead we couldn't reach three weeks or more ago answered 7.6% of the time, a little better than a brand new lead. An old list of no-answers isn't a dead list.
And they don't call back. About 3 in 100 of the leads we called ever rang us back.
What we do now: four calls over about ten days, then one more a month later. Every morning yesterday's no-answers go to the top of the list, ahead of the new leads.
The full post has the call-by-call table, the gaps between calls and a cadence you can copy: