For insurance agents, the list matters more than the hour

Every insurance sales forum has a thread asking for the best time to call leads. The answers are usually "late morning," "after 4pm," or "never on Monday." We looked at 33,835 outbound dials from seven insurance agencies on CallCloud, made between September 4 and October 26, 2026, to see if the data agrees.

It mostly doesn't. Once we accounted for which list was being dialed, time of day barely moved pickup rates. The list itself moved them by more than 2x.

The short version

• Hour of day: after adjusting for the list, every block from 8am to 6pm landed within a few pickups per 100 dials of that list's own average. Evenings (6 to 9pm local) were slightly better.
• The list: across 18 lists with at least 500 dials each, pickups ranged from 251 to 560 per 1,000 dials.
• Redials: how many times a number had already been dialed barely mattered. What happened last time mattered a lot: 603 pickups per 1,000 dials when a person answered the previous call, 178 when it rang out.
• Local presence: calling from the prospect's own area code helped a little, about 22 more pickups and 15 fewer voicemails per 1,000 dials in the cleanest comparison we could make. That's much smaller than the raw numbers first suggest.

All rates below are per 1,000 dials. Across the full dataset, 384 of every 1,000 dials were answered by a person and 101 went to voicemail.

Why the raw "best time" chart misleads

Here's what pickups look like by the prospect's local time when you simply count them up:

Read at face value, that table says midday is great and 4 to 6pm is a dead zone. But agents don't dial the same list all day. The agency in our data with the highest-pickup lists (local quote leads) only dialed between 9am and 3pm, so after 4pm nearly every dial came from lower-pickup Medicare and small-business lists. The "4pm slump" is mostly those lists, not the clock.

So we compared each call to the average for the list it came from. A score of 100 means "exactly what this list normally does."

With the list held constant, the daytime curve flattens out. Evenings come out a little ahead, which fits the obvious explanation: more people are home and off work.

Days of the week told the same story. Monday through Saturday all scored between 97 and 102. Sunday scored 113, but that comes from a single agency and 1,332 dials, so we wouldn't plan a week around it.

What actually moves the number: the list

Here are the 18 lists in our data with at least 500 dials each, grouped by pickup rate:

The worst list got 251 pickups per 1,000 dials and the best got 560. That gap is more than 10 times larger than the gap between any two times of day after adjustment.

In our data, the lists that did best were local consumer quote lists: people in the agent's own region who had recently asked about coverage. Statewide Medicare and small-business lists sat at the bottom.

What this means for an agent: if your connect rate is bad, rearranging your calling hours is unlikely to fix it. Look at your list source, how fresh the leads are, and what happened the last time each lead was called.

Does calling the same list again wear it out?

The common advice is that every pass through a list does worse than the one before. We checked by counting how many times each phone number had already been dialed by the same agency, then compared each dial to its list's average again.

The number of dials on its own predicted almost nothing. A second dial picked up about as often as the first. That surprised us, so we split repeat dials by what happened on the previous call:

This is where the real difference shows up. A number where a person answered last time picked up 603 times per 1,000 dials on the next call. A number that rang out last time picked up 178 times per 1,000. That's more than a 3x gap between two leads that have each been called once.

So lists don't wear out evenly. Repeat dials split into people who answer their phone and people who don't, and the flat "number of dials" table is those two groups averaging each other out.

What this means for an agent: on your next pass, don't treat the list as one block. Call the leads who picked up before first (callbacks, short hang-ups, "call me later"). Move the leads that rang out or went busy to the end of the session, or rest them for a while.

A caveat: "a person picked up" includes short calls where the prospect hung up quickly, and the deeper redials (6th and later) come from only two agencies. Treat the size of the gap as a direction.

Local presence: on or off?

Local presence means showing the prospect a caller ID from their own area code. It's one of the most common questions insurance agents ask about dialers, so we looked at it three ways.

1. Campaigns with local presence on vs off. This comparison isn't fair in our data. The campaigns with it off were dialing different lists at different times, so any gap mixes up the setting with the list. We're not reporting it.

2. Same campaign, matching area code vs not. Inside the same campaign, some calls went out on a number matching the prospect's area code and some didn't (for example, when no local number was available). 10 campaigns, 3 agencies, 9,361 dials:

3. Same campaign and the same prospect area code. Comparison 2 still has a hidden problem. Agents tend to own local numbers in the areas they're from, and those areas may pick up more anyway. So we narrowed it to prospects in the same area code, some called from a matching number and some not. That leaves 4,226 dials from one agency, across 3 area codes:

Our read: local presence gives a modest lift, about 22 more pickups and 15 fewer voicemails per 1,000 dials in the cleanest comparison. More than half of the bigger gap in comparison 2 comes from geography, not from the caller ID. Comparison 3 is a small sample, so treat it as a direction rather than a final answer.

Our practical advice: turn local presence on if you can do it cheaply and keep the numbers healthy, but don't expect it to rescue a bad list.

How we did this

• Data: every outbound dial from seven insurance agencies on CallCloud between September 4 and October 26, 2026. That's 33,835 dials after removing lines that were cancelled because the agent was already on another call, and dials that failed to connect at all. The agencies sell Medicare, final expense, home and auto, and small-business coverage.
• Concentration: two agencies account for 97% of the dials. This is not a census of the insurance industry. It's an honest look at what we can see, and we'll update it as more agencies dial.
• Pickup: the call was answered and our voicemail detector did not classify it as a voicemail or an automated system.
• Local time: taken from the prospect's area code.
• List-adjusted score: for each call we took the average pickup rate of the list it came from, added up those expected pickups for each group, and divided actual pickups by expected.
• Redials: counted per phone number within the same agency, across all of that agency's lists.
• Conversations: we left conversation length out of this report. Our voicemail handling changed partway through the period, so talk-time comparisons across those weeks aren't like for like.
• Privacy: all figures are aggregated. No agency, prospect, or phone number is identified.

We'll refresh these numbers as the dataset grows. CallCloud's Parallel Dialer already puts the leads who picked up before at the front of each session, ranked by each number's own call history. More on how agencies use it is on our insurance page.