How Many Hours Should a Land Cold Caller Dial? Part Time vs Full Time
How many hours a land cold caller should dial each week, what part time and full time schedules produce, and how to plan caller hours around your deal goals.
The honest answer is: enough hours to get through your list while it is fresh, and enough conversations a month to hit your deal goal. Here is how to work out the number.
Start from deals, not hours
Work backwards from the deals you want each month.
- Deals per month you want. Say 2.
- Contracts you need per deal closed. Some contracts fall apart in due diligence. If 1 in 2 closes, you need 4 contracts.
- Qualified sellers per contract. If your acquisitions team signs 1 in 6 qualified sellers, you need 24 qualified sellers.
- Qualified sellers per caller. On our floor, a full time caller produces 20 to 30 a month.
In this example you need about one full time caller. Your own ratios will differ, so track them (see land cold calling KPIs).
What “full time” means in practice
A full time caller is roughly 40 hours a week of dial time. Our Basic plan is 180 caller hours a month, about one full time caller. Pro is 360 hours and Elite is 720.
Part time callers
Part time calling (10 to 20 hours a week) can work for testing a single county. The tradeoffs:
- Slower learning. Fewer conversations means it takes longer to know if the list and script work.
- Stale lists. If it takes months to work through a list, owners you reach late have already been called by others.
- Harder to manage. Part time callers often have other jobs, so schedules slip.
When to call
Owners answer at different times depending on who they are. Retired owners may pick up during the day; working owners are easier to reach in the evening or on Saturday. Test blocks across the day, track contact rate by hour, and shift hours to what works. Always stay inside allowed calling hours in the owner’s time zone, which federally means 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Some states are stricter; see our TCPA guide.
Dial hours vs total hours
Not every paid hour is dialing. Breaks, notes, callbacks and training all take time. When you compare offers, ask how many of the hours are actually spent on the dialer, and who handles callbacks and follow ups.
Hours are only as good as the list
Ten hours on a clean, filtered, skip traced list beats forty on a raw county export. Before you add hours, make sure the list is right: see how to find off market land deals.