During the years of analyzing the market, sales approach and different statistics, we collected some interesting information about the common behavior of companies during the sales process and related brand promotion or marketing activities.
Lead Generation
- Just 8% of salespeople state that the leads generated for them by their marketing teams are of high quality.
- The best-performing sales reps use LinkedIn 6 hours a week for prospecting and connecting with peers.
- 94% of prospects are active on social media…
- … and yet only 5% of B2B sales teams consider social media to be a useful lead generation tool.
- Less than 50% of the initial prospects turn out to be a good fit.
- More than ¾ of companies are providing more than ¼ of their sales reps’ leads.
- It’s 6-7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.
- The average company loses 10-30% of its customers each year.
- 55% of B2B buyers search for information on social media.
Writing Sales Emails
- Using a CTA button in place of a link increased click-throughs by 28%.
- Less is more – one study found that click-through rates increased 42% when the number of CTAs in an email decreased from four to just one.
- 47% of emails are opened or discarded based solely on their subject line.
- As of 2016, 55% of emails were opened on mobile devices.
- Using words like “account,” “campaign,” and “next” in the subject line of sales emails has been proven to increase open rates.
- Three of the most ineffective words to include in subject lines are “invite,” “join,” and “confirm.”
- Writing your subject line entirely in upper case significantly reduces response rates.
- Subject lines consisting of three or four words resulted in the highest response rate.
- Personalizing subject lines can increase open rates by 50%.
- Offer recipients a way out doubles the chance of them saying yes.
- Including questions in emails increases response rates by 50%.
- Writing at a third-grade reading level increases response rates by 36%.
- The ideal length of a sales email is between 50 and 125 words.
Sending Sales Emails
- The best time to send an email is between 8 am-10 am and 3 pm-4 pm.
- The best day to send an email is Tuesday.
- 8 out of 10 prospects want to talk to sales reps via email over any other medium.
- The average person spends 4 hours a week, opening, reading, and responding to emails.
- B2C sales emails typically see higher open rates than B2B sales emails. Specifically, B2B open rates average at around 30% and B2C, between 30.5% and 34.9%.
- 89% of marketers say that email is their primary channel for lead generation.
- Email marketing yields an average ROI of 4,300%.
- Email is nearly 40x more effective at new customer acquisition than Facebook or Twitter.
- 70% of salespeople give up if they don’t receive a reply to their first email.
- The average cold email campaign gets less than a 1% response rate.
- Follow-up emails often get a better response rate than the initial email. One study saw an 18% response rate to the first email, 13% to the 4th, and 27% to the 6th. Another study saw a 30% response rate to the first email and 14% to the 4th. Even the 10th email in the sequence got a 7% response rate.
- Open rates vary depending on the industry, but the average open rate for emails across all industries is 37%.
Picking Up the Phone
- 92% of all customer interactions take place over the phone.
- 75% of prospects in the C-suite are happy to take sales calls (compared to 64% of directors and 59% of managers).
- You’re 46% more likely to successfully connect with a director when dialing a direct dial number.
- … and you’re 147% more likely to connect when calling a VP’s direct line successfully.
- 80% of phone calls go straight to voicemail, and 90% of first-time voicemails are ignored.
- Despite this, the average sales rep spends 25 hours a month just leaving voicemail messages.
- The ideal length of a voicemail message is between 8 and 14 seconds.
- It takes an average of 18 calls to connect with a buyer.
- Just 2% of cold calls result in an appointment.
- 85% of prospects are dissatisfied with their experiences of talking to sales reps on the phone.
- Sales call lasting between 6-10 minutes convert at a higher rate (29%) than calls over 10 minutes (22%).
Referrals
- Peer recommendations affect more than 90% of buying decisions.
- Although 91% of customers state, they would willingly give a referral, just 11% of sales reps ask for them.
- Sales reps who actively seek out referrals typically earn 4 to 5 times as much as those who don’t.
- 80% of calls with a referred prospect result in a meeting.
- The average lifetime value of a referred customer is 16% higher than that of a non-referred customer.
- Prospects referred by a friend are four times more likely to make a purchase.
Lead Nurturing
- Companies that excel at lead nurturing have 9% more sales reps making quota.
- 78% of decision-makers report having arranged an appointment or attending an event as a result of a cold email or call.
- Lead nurturing emails have an average CTR of 8% compared to general emails, which have a CTR of 3%.
- Nurtured leads tend to result in an additional 20% more sales opportunities.
- Businesses that use marketing automation to help nurture prospects see a 451% increase in qualified leads.
- Nurtured leads spend 47% more than non-nurtured leads.
- High-growth organizations report an average of 16 touchpoints per prospect within a 2-4 week span.
- 63% of prospects who request information today will not buy for at least three months. 20% of them will take more than 12 months to buy.
- The average cost of a call to a potential customer is just $33.11. The average cost of going out and visiting them is $276.48.
- 58% of buyers state that sales meetings aren’t valuable and that there should be a greater focus on the value you can deliver them.
- 69% of buyers state that providing primary research data that are relevant to their business is the best way for reps to add value.
- According to buyers, the three most important elements of a positive sales experience are a sales representative who 1) listens to their needs, 2) isn’t pushy, and 3) provides relevant information.
- 58% of buyers want to discuss pricing in the first sales call, but only 23% of reps want to discuss it with them.
- 54% of buyers want a product demo on the first call.
- 82% of B2B buyers think sales reps are unprepared.
- Only 19% of buyers want to connect with sales reps during the awareness stage of the sales cycle; 60% of them want to wait until they reach the consideration stage.
- 95% of customers choose to buy from providers that offer relevant content at every stage of the buying process.
- The best-performing sales reps use collaborative words like “we” or “us” instead of words like “I” or “me.”
- Following a presentation, 63% of prospects remember stories, but just 5% remember statistics.
- 9 out of 10 B2B buyers say online content has a moderate to major effect on their purchasing decisions.
- 68% of B2B customers are lost because of indifference or perceived apathy, not because of mistakes.
Closing the Sale
- Between 30-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first.
- 38% of salespeople say getting a response from prospects is becoming increasingly more difficult.
- 35% of sales reps say the same about closing a sale.
- 92% of salespeople give up after four “no’s,” but 80% of prospects say “no” four times before they say “yes.
- Jason Zook, the founder of the now-dissolved IWearYourShirt, generated about 75% of successful deals from follow-up emails.
- 73% of sales reps that leverage social selling exceeds their quota 23% more often than their counterparts.
- Just 8% of sales reps are making 80% of the sales.
- 36% of sales reps say closing the sale is the most challenging part of their job.
- Using the word “discount” decreases the odds of successfully closing a sale by 17%.
- 55% of sales reps say the budget is the most common reason a promising deal falls through.
And the Rest
- 61% of sales reps believe selling is harder than it was ten years ago.
- The average company spends $10-$15K hiring a sales rep, but just $2K a year training them.
- The best-performing sales organizations are twice as likely to provide ongoing training than low-performing ones.
- It takes at least ten months for a new sales rep to reach their full potential.
- Without ongoing learning, 84% of sales training is forgotten within 90 days.
- 18% of sales reps don’t know what a CRM is.
- 40% of sales reps still use tools like Outlook or Excel to store customer and lead data.
- 32% of sales reps are spending an hour or more on data entry every day.
- 45% of sales teams state excessive administration tasks hinder their productivity.
- Data decays at about 2% a month. This means that 20% of your data will be unusable within a year.
- 25% of the data in a typical sales database is inaccurate.
- The average company loses 12% of its revenue as a result of inaccurate data.
- High-performing companies are twice as likely as underperforming companies to describe their sales processes as automated.
- While 50% of sales reps state they avoid being pushy when approaching buyers, 84% of buyers felt this wasn’t the case.
- 40% of sales reps say that prospecting is the most challenging part of their job.
- Firms with between 100-500 employees will have, on average, just seven members of staff involved in buying decisions.
- Just 13% of prospects believe a sales rep can understand their needs.
- Sales reps that use the third channel of communication in addition to phone and email have 28% higher MQL-to-SQL rates.
- Prospects open only 24% of sales emails.
- Email marketing has a 4,400% return on investment.