Skip to main content
Outbound calling works best as a system you keep tuning, not a script you set once. This page distills published sales research into a starting playbook for your campaigns — check it against your own numbers and adjust from there.

​
Who to call

Define your ideal customer profile before writing a single line of script:
  • Company fit — size, industry, region, and technology stack.
  • Persona fit — role, goals, pain points, and what triggered the outreach (a funding round, a new hire, a renewal date coming up).
Store these as custom attributes on your contacts — industry, use case, funnel stage, intent signal — then save a segment for each combination worth targeting on its own. A value proposition tailored to one segment, kept to a sentence or two, consistently beats a generic pitch aimed at everyone.

​
When to call

Connect rates vary sharply by time of day, and speed of follow-up matters even more:
  • B2B: late morning (10am–12pm) and late afternoon (4–5:30pm) local time tend to connect best; Wednesday and Thursday usually outperform Monday and Friday (Gong, XANT/InsideSales).
  • B2C: 11am–1pm and 5–7:30pm local time tend to work well — avoid very early mornings and late evenings (HubSpot).
  • Speed beats timing: reaching a new lead within five minutes can improve connect odds by an order of magnitude compared with waiting even an hour (Harvard Business Review).
Set calling windows per campaign so dialing only happens in your best hours, and turn on retry until a human answers — a retry lands at a different hour automatically, which is exactly the kind of variation the data above rewards.

​
What to say

Lead with listening, not pitching. The LAER framework, from Carew International, keeps a call centered on the customer instead of the script:
  • Listen — let them finish before responding.
  • Acknowledge — reflect back what you heard.
  • Explore — ask what would make this relevant to them.
  • Respond — offer a specific next step, not a generic pitch.
Calls where the rep talks less — roughly 40–50% of the time — consistently correlate with higher conversion (Gong); the same logic applies to how long your assistant’s turns run. A handful of objections cover most calls. Keep a short response ready for each: Turn these into your assistant’s actual guidelines and response patterns in Prompt writing.

​
Improving the script

Treat your opening and objection handling as something to keep testing, not something to finish once:
1

Measure the current state

Conversion, median call duration, and where calls drop off — start from the campaign’s own progress and delivery figures and the call-level detail in History.
2

Form a hypothesis

For example: “a shorter opening increases appointment rate,” or “naming the industry up front reduces early hang-ups.”
3

Run it as an A/B test

Split your audience into two comparable segments — a custom attribute such as test_group is the simplest way to do it — then run the current script and the variant as two campaigns over the same window, so nothing but the script differs.
4

Evaluate and roll out

Keep the winner, stop the losing campaign, and move on to the next hypothesis.

​
What to measure

Track the funnel stage by stage rather than a single top-line number — connect rate, meeting rate, and close rate each have different levers: Compare cohorts — time window against time window, script version against script version, segment against segment — rather than reading a single campaign’s numbers in isolation; the difference is what actually tells you something worked. Published SDR benchmark reports such as The Bridge Group are a useful outside reference for what “good” looks like at your stage. Call QA averages and cohort QA runs add a quality signal alongside these outcome numbers. See also Dialer, retries & compliance and Prompt writing.