Merchant cash advance is a volume game, and everyone in it knows the dirty secret: most of your list is dead numbers, wrong numbers, and people who will not pick up. The job was never really "making calls." The job is burning through the no-answers fast enough to reach the handful of merchants who actually talk — and then not fumbling those few conversations. Here is what the research across the wider calling market says about each part of that, and what it means for an ISO working a list.
The numbers nobody in MCA wants to hear
Start with the wall you are dialing into. Surveys of U.S. consumers have found that the large majority — around 87% in one widely-cited figure from GrowthList — routinely ignore calls from numbers they do not recognize. So before script, before timing, before anything, most dials simply will not be answered by a human.
Gong's analysis puts the average rep's live-connect rate near 5% of dials, while top-quartile reps reach roughly 15% — and Cognism's own data suggests mid-teens is achievable with clean numbers and good timing. Translated to the desk: you are dialing somewhere around 15–20 times to get one real conversation, and only a small slice of those convert.
The persistence data is where most brokers quietly lose money. Industry figures compiled by SalesSo and others put the count at about 8 attempts to reach a given prospect — yet most reps stop after about 2. By the third attempt the majority of the conversations that will ever happen have already happened (on the order of nine in ten), with sharply diminishing returns past the fifth. Cognism's connect data tells the same story from another angle: roughly three-quarters of connects land on the first dial, about 15% more on the second, and around 7% on the third.
Most reps give up after about 2 attempts. It takes roughly 8 to reach one prospect. The merchants who would have funded are often sitting in the attempts you never made.
When to dial
Timing will not save a bad list, but it moves connect rates more than people expect. Across studies from Cognism, Revenue.io and others, the strongest window is mid-to-late morning — roughly 10–11 AM local time — with a second bump in the afternoon around 2–5 PM. One analysis of about 250,000 calls by MightyCall found the 8 AM hour converting near 27% and falling off after noon, as inboxes fill and decision-makers get pulled into their day.
On days of the week, the research is unusually consistent: Tuesday through Thursday win. ZoomInfo's look at 1.4 million outbound calls found the middle of the week clearly best, and UpLead and Cognism land in the same place. Monday mornings, Friday afternoons, and weekends are the weak spots — with one wrinkle worth knowing: Friday can be good for loose conversations even though it is the worst day for actually booking. For MCA specifically, catch merchants when the counter is open but not slammed: mid-morning before the lunch rush, late afternoon as things wind down.
What happens once a merchant picks up
This is where Gong's data, drawn from analyzing millions of recorded sales calls, gets genuinely useful. Gong frames the opening as having about five seconds to earn five minutes — and the numbers back it up: successful cold calls run roughly twice as long as unsuccessful ones. Getting past the first ten seconds is most of the battle.
The openers matter more than almost anything else you control:
- Leading with a warm "How have you been?" correlated with a 6.6x higher success rate in Gong's data, pushing booking above 10%.
- The reflexive "Did I catch you at a bad time?" did the opposite — cratering to about a 0.9% success rate and dropping booking odds by roughly 40%.
- Stating your reason for calling early lifted success about 2.1x, and saying "we" instead of "I" was tied to ~35% higher success.
One counterintuitive finding: on a cold call, the winners actually talk a bit more than they listen (around a 55/45 talk-to-listen split), because the goal of the cold call is to book the next conversation — not to run discovery. Save the questions for the meeting you booked.
The psychology underneath the numbers
Why does "How have you been?" beat a polite "bad time?" so badly? Gong calls the first one a pattern interrupt. A merchant's reflex when an unknown number calls is a pre-loaded "not interested / not now." A familiar, human question scrambles that autopilot for half a second — long enough to make them process instead of bounce. "Did I catch you at a bad time?" does the reverse: it hands them control and pre-writes the exit before you have earned a single second.
The deeper lesson is about who the real barrier is. The data says reach takes about eight touches, but reps quit at two. That gap is not the merchant being unreachable — it is the rep's own aversion to hearing "no." The bottleneck in most MCA desks isn't the list or the script. It's how many times the broker is willing to get rejected before they walk away. And relevance beats timing: RAIN Group's research found executives are surprisingly open to being contacted by phone when the reason is relevant to them.
The playbook: turning all of this into booked deals
- 1Dial in the windows. Tuesday–Thursday, 10–11 AM and 2–5 PM local. Skip Monday mornings and Friday afternoons.
- 2Commit to ~6–8 attempts per merchant before you retire the lead. Stopping at 2 is leaving most of your conversations on the table.
- 3Open human, then get to the point. "Hey [name], how've you been?" → state your reason fast. Never lead with "bad time?".
- 4Earn the first ten seconds and keep steering toward one goal: booking the next conversation, not discovery.
- 5Say "we," stay concise, and don't dump rates or ROI math on a cold call — it's too early to land.
- 6Go multi-channel. Pair dials with a quick text or email; multi-channel sequences convert materially better than calling alone.
- 7Protect your dials-per-hour. Since only ~1 in 20 dials reaches a human, raw volume is the lever — so kill the dead time between calls.
Roughly one in twenty dials reaches a live person. That single fact is why volume wins MCA — and why every second spent manually dialing, sitting through voicemail, or logging a call is a second you're not in a funding conversation.
That last point is the whole reason ZuriDialr exists. The data is brutally clear that MCA is won on volume and persistence, not on a cleverer script — and the thing quietly destroying volume is the dead time between dials. Cut that out and your conversations scale without adding hours to your day.
Sources: Gong Labs (cold-call analysis), Cognism (State of Cold Calling), ZoomInfo (1.4M-call analysis), MightyCall, RAIN Group, GrowthList, and SalesSo. Figures are industry aggregates and will vary by list, market, and rep.
Why the dialer wins you more deals
In MCA, the only thing that scales is at-bats. You can't out-script a 1-in-20 connect rate — you out-dial it. Every extra merchant you reach today is one who doesn't take the other eleven calls, and a hands-free dialer turns the same hours into roughly twice the conversations: twice the funded deals from the same list.
How ZuriDialr does it:
- Auto-advances to the next merchant the instant a call ends — no clicking, no dead air between dials.
- Skips voicemail and dead air on its own, so your time goes to merchants who actually pick up.
- Logs every dial and disposition to the contact automatically — zero manual entry.
- One-key voicemail drop when you do want to leave a message — in your voice, not a robotic blast.
Stop losing volume to dead time.
ZuriDialr is a hands-free power dialer that runs right inside GoHighLevel — queue your merchants, hit start, and it dials straight through, auto-skipping voicemail and dead air.
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