Is the Monday the best day to take off from work, or to call leads?

Research on 20,000 leads has no questions about when to follow up leads best!

How many leads come in, when do they come in and what is the best time to call those leads? The answer is simple. The right time to follow up is: immediately, of course! Chances are that the customer is still behind his screen. He is therefore available and is often in the right mood to make contact. Unfortunately, leads also arrive after closing time and on Sundays. What to do with these leads? When is the best time for a follow up? When is the best time to contact leads that come in on Saturday night and on Sunday? In the BDC of the #DCDW we have asked our Call Stars to find out.

Opening hours in 2018
This data is slightly colored, after all our BDC is operational from Monday to Friday from 09:00 am to 09:00 pm and on Saturdays to 04:00 pm. This means that we don’t start mornings with a tsunami of leads from the night before. For every OEM, I think it should also be a requirement to have the leads followed up by the dealers in this time frame. On the other hand, there is the Saturday evening and Sunday. When there are more leads coming in, don’t you have a tsunami of leads on Monday morning? Especially on that Monday, more sellers take off from work than is desirable, in connection with working on Saturdays. So more leads to deal with, with fewer salespeople…

How many leads when
As far as I’m concerned, every OEM would have to demand from his dealers that leads will be followed up within the time frame we use. If you do so, there will still be no activity on Saturday night and Sunday when it comes to lead follow-up. That could lead to an accumulation of leads on Monday morning, when salesmen are often at home, because they have worked on Saturday. A problem, because you have more leads to deal with and fewer sellers than usual….

Our research, based on over 20,000 leads, yields the following figures: the Saturday evening and Sunday account for 13.4% of the leads in this dataset. That is not an exaggeration. On the Monday, 12.3% comes in. But be careful. If you add the numbers of the Saturday evening and the Sunday, then the Monday is good for 25.7% of the total. And that makes it all of a sudden a busy day in terms of leads!

Before we finished the research, my theory was that a Sunday lead answers the phone in the afternoon and not in the morning. I thought it would make sense to plan those leads in the afternoon. Because our BDC plans every lead starting from 09:00 am, we can measure which moment is most successful and leads to a meaningful dialogue. Guess what? I was totally wrong with my theory. The results are significantly different than I thought..

It turns out that during the first three hours of the Monday morning we have meaningful conversations. So you have to push from Monday morning at 09:00 am to speak to the customer as soon as possible after the lead has been submitted. That brings me to the following conclusion, and that will not be a very appealing one to many sellers: given the number of leads, Monday is not the right day to take some time off. There are simply too many leads waiting for follow-up: the leads that came in on Saturday night, Sunday and Monday.

If you look further and take the weekly call statistics from the #DCDW Call Track Manager, the Monday turns out to have the least incoming sales calls of the working week (even less on Saturday). In addition, the Monday has the most missed sales calls. Logically, most sellers are not in. In any case, the research makes it clear to me that the process can be improved. In fact, it should be better.

Next time we will find out when we can make an appointment. Is that in the first or second dialogue? Or in the first dialogue, but only in the afternoon and not in the morning? To be continued..

About Paul de Vries
Paul (1972) starts his career as service station attendant and developed himself from car salesman to co-owner of a dealer company. In this company, Paul learned early on that online automotive has the future, so he started selling cars online.
In the meantime, besides his work for Marktplaats, Paul is very busy. With #DCDW he offers different services to car companies, such as Call Track Manager, the virtual BDC and Calldrip, and he provides seminars, training courses, workshops and presentations to improve lead follow-up and online automotive in the Netherlands.

Paul de Vries weekly presents an interesting podcast with guests from home and abroad. Recently his second book, ‘Follow-up: meer succes als digitaal autobedrijf’, appeared as the sequel to the successful book ‘Lead the Way op de digitale snelweg’.