How many times should you call a lead before you write it off?

Ask ten sales managers and you will get answers between three and twelve. Both extremes are defensible and neither is a number you should adopt without checking, because the right answer depends on your own contact curve.

Measure your own curve first

Take your last few hundred leads and record, for each one that you eventually spoke to, which attempt made contact. You are looking for the point at which additional attempts stop producing meaningful numbers of conversations.

Almost every team that does this finds two things. Contact is concentrated far earlier than they expected, and the tail is longer than they expected. Both matter.

Attempt 1-3 where most contacts happen for exclusive leads

For exclusive leads the curve is steep, because nobody else has rung. For shared leads it flattens, because the homeowner has already spoken to three companies and has stopped answering unknown numbers.

The question is marginal, not total

The right way to think about attempt seven is not 'does it ever work' — it does, occasionally. It is 'does the contact rate at attempt seven, multiplied by everything downstream, cover the cost of making it?'

At £18 an hour and two minutes per attempt including CRM time, an attempt costs about 60p. If attempt seven produces a contact in one case out of forty, that is £24 of calling per extra conversation. Whether that is worth it depends on what a conversation is worth to you — which is the calculation in our piece on what a lead is worth.

Vary the time, not just the count

Six attempts at the same hour on six consecutive days is functionally one attempt repeated. The people you have not reached are usually people who are not available at that hour.

• Spread attempts across morning, lunchtime and early evening
• Include at least one attempt on a Saturday morning where your permissions allow
• Leave a voicemail on the first and last attempts, not every one
• Send one text between attempts if the enquiry captured consent for it

A reasonable default while you measure

For exclusive leads, five attempts across five to seven days, at three different times of day, with a voicemail on the first and last and one text in between. Then close the record as unreachable and, if the number turned out to be dead, flag it for replacement inside the window.

Adopt that as a starting point, measure your curve for a month, then move the number to where your own data says it should be. The default is a placeholder; the measurement is the point.