Finding the best time to reach out to your prospects

An important part of any sales process is being able to connect with your prospects, and to do that you’ll need to know when someone is able and willing to talk to you! You’re probably already using the CRM to keep track of these individual interactions, and you can also use the CRM to find the best time to reach out.

You should already be using pipelines to track progress with your prospects, and you can customize your pipeline further to help track the best time to call someone. By adding a custom field to the pipeline, you can keep track of when someone is typically available for a chat, and in turn convert prospects into sales without playing phone tag for days.

Creating a custom field is easy! Simply go to the Pipelines settings page, and choose “Edit” beneath the Lead pipeline. From that page, click “Create a new custom field” and then enter the field name, perhaps “Best Time to Call.” Next, select checkbox as the field type, and then enter the time ranges you’d like as options.

Please note: the term “Lead” is customizable. Lead is the name of a specific pipeline, and your account may show other options on the navigation bar and in settings.

Finally, hit “Create custom field."  That will add the field to your pipeline so you can begin tracking when a prospect is likely available to talk. This custom field will appear below the statuses in a pipeline, and you can check off when a prospect is most likely to be available, so you know when to reach out next time.

If you’re not sure when is the best time to reach a prospect, check your notes! You should leave a note every time you reach out, even if just to say that you left a voicemail. Notes are automatically date and time-stamped, so you can review notes to see when you have been able to reach a prospect and when you haven’t had much luck connecting.

Once you start saving that information for your contacts, you can view it in your Lead report, and even use a filter to find everyone you need to call in the morning, afternoon, or evening! To filter by this new custom field, simply select “Add a filter” in the “Sort and filter” section on the left side of your Lead report page. Choose “Best Time to Call” and then select the time you’d like to view.

When you apply that filter, it will pull up a list of contacts with the selected time period. You can then work through your prospect list based on the best time to reach them.

That’s it! Now that you’re tracking the best time to call you can focus your efforts on calling prospects you know will be available to talk, instead of spending time leaving voicemails and playing phone tag.

Still have questions? Less Annoying CRM comes with free phone and email support - even if you're not a paying customer! Use our contact page to get a hold of us, and we'll be happy to help however we can.