Five agents. Five hours of dialing a day. Twenty-two days a month. That is 550 hours of human attention you are paying for.
Now ask how many of those hours turned into a conversation with somebody who could buy. Most owners answer with total calls, which is not the same number.
I sell dialer software, so I have this conversation a lot. The owner knows his licence price to the dollar and his carrier rate to four decimal places. What he does not know is what one conversation costs him.
That is the only number that connects the software invoice to the revenue it is supposed to produce. Here is the arithmetic.
- An agent who is paid for 60 minutes gives you about 30 minutes of talking.
- Five agents, 550 hours a month, is roughly 5,500 real conversations.
- Software costs 0.4 to 18 cents per conversation, depending on the dialer.
- The list matters more than the dialer. A bad list needs seven times the dials for the same result.
- Five agents should not run predictive dialing at 4:1. The US 3% abandonment rule makes it hard to hold.
- Measure four numbers weekly: talk minutes per hour, contact rate, conversations per agent per day, and cost per conversation.
Three terms, in plain English
Talk time is the minutes an agent spends speaking with a human. Not logged-in time. Not the time the phone rings. Eight hours at a desk, three hours talking, is three hours of talk time.
Contact rate, also called connect rate or answer rate, is how many dials reach a live person. Dial a hundred numbers, get six humans, that is 6%. Voicemail and ring-no-answer do not count.
Cost per conversation is your total phone spend — software, minutes, numbers — divided by real conversations. Not leads. Not dials. Conversations.
That third number is the only way to compare a $10 dialer with a $159 dialer honestly. Everything else is a unit somebody picked to make their own price look small.
Where the hour goes
One agent, one logged-in hour
A consumer campaign, measured across a normal week.
Notes — 6 min
Waiting — 14 min
Breaks, coaching — 10 min
Half the hour is the product. The other half is what the job requires to deliver it. Wrap-up and waiting are the two you can actually move.
This has one consequence. If an agent costs $4 an hour and talks half of it, every hour of conversation costs $8 in wages. At $18 an hour, it costs $36.
That is why “we save you $100 a seat” is a weak claim by itself. $100 against $36 an hour of agent time is less than three hours. The software price only matters in the context of how many conversations that agent time produces.
Dials to conversations
Contact rates in cold outbound are brutal. The gap between a good list and a bad one is wider than the gap between any two dialers.
Published benchmarks put cold B2B at 2% to 5.4% of dials. Verified mobiles reach 9% to 13%. Warm lists run 20% to 30%. Those are somebody’s samples, so treat them as ranges and measure your own.
Here is what they mean for our five-agent team, which needs 5,500 conversations a month.
Dials needed for 5,500 conversations
The same target at five different contact rates.
The bad list needs seven times the dials for exactly the same result. That is the argument for spending money on data before software.
The 3% row is not just expensive. It is impossible. 183,000 dials across 550 agent-hours is 333 dials per hour, or one every eleven seconds. Nobody places a one-at-a-time call that fast, because the ring alone takes twenty seconds. You would have to dial several numbers at once, and that runs into the 3% rule below. The list sets your ceiling.
Those extra 158,000 dials are also nearly free in carrier terms. Most providers bill from the moment the call is answered, so a number that rings out costs nothing in minutes. What a bad list costs you is agent time, number reputation, and the price of a better list.
What a conversation costs
Same team: 550 agent-hours, 16,500 talk minutes, 5,500 conversations at three minutes each. Carrier minutes come to $82.50 at half a cent, plus $3 for numbers. That part is identical on any software.
So here is the software side.
Software cost per conversation
Five agents, 5,500 conversations a month, October 2026 prices.
List prices times five agents. Ecsow uses three lines, because five agents need about three calls at once. Add the same $85.50 of carrier and numbers to every row and the gap shrinks from 45× to about 8× against Five9 and 10× against ReadyMode.
Two things worth noticing.
First, the $85.50 does a lot of work. On a US campaign at half a cent a minute, software is a fifth of the bill at the cheap end and nine tenths at the expensive end. On a Philippines campaign at thirty cents, the carrier bill for 16,500 minutes is $4,950 and every bar above becomes a rounding error. That is the point I made in the SIP pricing post.
Second, 0.4¢ and 18.1¢ are both small numbers. That is not an argument for the cheap one. It is an argument that if your offer converts, software price hardly matters. If it does not convert, no dialer saves you. Price matters most in the first six months, when you are still finding out whether the offer works. That is exactly where most Ecsow customers are.
Why five agents should not run 4:1
This part costs me sales, so pay attention.
In the US, the FCC rule 47 CFR 64.1200(a)(7) caps abandoned calls at 3% of calls answered by a person, measured over 30 days per campaign. A call is abandoned if it is not connected to a live agent within two seconds of the greeting. The same section requires a recorded identification message and an opt-out on any abandoned call, and forbids hanging up before 15 seconds or four rings.
Two seconds is the whole window a predictive dialer has to find a free agent. To do that at 4:1 you need enough agents that somebody is almost always free. The usual guidance is eight or more, with careful pacing and real supervision. With five agents, one bad afternoon pushes you over 3%, and the 3% is measured across the whole month.
So at five seats, run one call at a time per agent. It is slower per agent, and it is the only setting that is comfortably legal and comfortable for the person answering. If you have thirty agents, buy a real predictive engine and hire someone to tune it. If you have five, buying prediction you cannot legally use is how you pay $159 a seat for a dialer set to 1:1.
I am not a lawyer, and this is the US rule. India, the Philippines, Nigeria, the UAE and the EU each have their own, and several are stricter about consent and calling hours. Check yours before you scale.
What actually moves the needle
- The list. A verified mobile list connects at roughly three times the rate of a switchboard list. That beats every dialer feature combined, and costs less than a month of expensive software.
- Caller ID health. First Orion’s published research puts answer rates near 52% on a clean number and near 11% on one labelled “Potential Spam”. A 40-point swing is bigger than the gap between the best and worst list above.
- Time of day. Late afternoon beats late morning. Midweek beats Friday. Everyone agrees on the direction and disagrees on the exact hours, so test it on your own logs.
- Number rotation. Carriers start flagging at about a hundred calls per number per day. Five agents on one number burn it in a week. Five agents on four numbers do not.
- The dialer. Last, and mostly for labour. It can remove the dialing, the waiting and the note-taking from the hour. That is worth 10 to 20 minutes of talk time. Not a new business. If you want to see where those minutes leak away, how a dialer tells a human from a voicemail is the most common place.
Where Ecsow is worse
- No workforce management. No forecasting, scheduling or adherence. You run shifts in a spreadsheet.
- Reporting is an export, not a wallboard. Call records and reports in Excel, plus a live campaign view. No thirty-metric supervisor dashboard.
- Pacing is manual. No adaptive engine learning your answer rates. Somebody has to look and change a setting.
- No list cleaning or DNC scrubbing. You bring clean data, or you get the connect rate your data deserves.
- Windows only, outbound only, 32 lines. No browser, no inbound, no blended campaigns.
- Email support, about a day. If a campaign breaks on Saturday, you read the manual.
And the one that matters most: a cheap dialer lets you lose money more slowly, not faster. If you will not open the report once a week, the software price is the least of your problems.
Four numbers for the wall
Talk minutes per agent-hour. Below 25 means a pacing or list problem. Above 40 on cold data means somebody is dialing too hard.
Contact rate. Dials against conversations with a human. Split it by list source, not by campaign. The source is where the answer lives.
Conversations per agent per day. Your agents feel this one, and it moves first when a list goes stale.
Total phone spend divided by conversations. Software, carrier and numbers, once a month. When it drifts, you will know which part moved.
For the software half of that last number, Ecsow starts at $10 a month for one line and $22 for three, with no per-minute markup and a 15-day refund. Download it and run a campaign of twenty contacts on your own list. That is enough to see your real contact rate.
If you are still comparing, the published price list and the cheapest-options ladder cover the software side, and the VICIdial piece covers the free option without flattering it.
Questions
What is a good talk time for outbound agents?
On a dialer-assisted consumer campaign, 25 to 40 minutes of real conversation per logged-in hour is a workable band. Below 25 usually means a list or pacing problem. Sustained above 40 on cold data usually means pacing aggressive enough to create abandoned calls.
What is a good contact rate for cold calling?
Cold B2B lists land at 2% to 6% of dials. Verified mobiles reach 9% to 13%. Warm lists run 20% to 30%. Measure by list source, because two sources in one campaign often differ more than two industries.
How much does one outbound conversation cost?
At five agents producing 5,500 conversations a month, software runs from about 0.4 cents per conversation on a per-line dialer to about 18 cents at $199 a seat. Add carrier minutes, identical on both, and the all-in figures are roughly 2 cents and 20 cents.
Can a predictive dialer work with five agents?
It can run, but it cannot legally dial aggressively. The US rule caps abandoned calls at 3% over 30 days, with a two-second window to connect an agent, and that is hard to hold below about eight agents. At five seats, one call at a time is the sane setting.