Whether you conduct your sales outreach by phone, social media, or email—it’s undeniably an essential aspect of B2B sales.
Everything from the channel you select to the language you use impacts how your prospect will respond. The more information you have—the better!
Today we’ll cover a list of insights around sales follow-up productivity, channels, cadences, and effectiveness.
B2B Sales Follow Up Statistics
Sales Follow Up Productivity
1. 42.5% of reps take 10 months or longer to become productive enough to contribute to company goals (source).
2. Salespeople spend one-third of their day actually talking to prospects. Other initiatives include (source).
- Emailing (21%)
- Data Entry (17%)
- Prospecting & researching leads (17%)
- Internal meetings (12%)
- Scheduling calls (12%)
3. Sales development reps average 94.4 daily activities, including 36.2 emails, 35.9 phone calls, 15.3 voicemail messages, and 7.0 social media touches (source).
- These activities led to an average of 14.1 meaningful conversations a day, 23.1 appointments set.
- 72.3% of appointments set become opportunities passed to sales, with 12.5 opportunities accepted per month.
- Of the opportunities accepted, 29.3% closed, which means that the average SDR is responsible for about 11 deals per quarter.
Sales Follow Up Channels
4. Email marketing has two times higher returns than cold calling (source).
5. 33% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone (source).
6. Subject lines with more than 3 words experience a drop in open rate by over 60% (source).
7. For B2B companies, subject lines that contained the words “alert” and “breaking” perform well (source).
8. B2B customers have become desensitized to words such as “reports”, “forecasts”, and “intelligence” (source).
9. Personalized emails including the recipient’s first name in the subject line can boost open rates by 29.3% (source).
Phone Calls
10. 55% of high-growth companies – who experienced a minimum of 40% growth over the previous three years – stated that cold calling is very much alive (source).
11. One study showed that telephone outreach out-converted emails by a significant margin – 8.21% vs 0.03% (source).
12. 78% of decision-makers polled have taken an appointment or attended an event that came from a cold call (source).
13. The average sales development rep makes 52 calls daily (source).
14. 6-10 minutes is the optimal length for an SDR live call. Calls that last between 6-10 minutes convert at a higher rate (29%) than calls that are longer than 10 minutes (22%) (source).
15. The average voicemail response rate is 4.8% (source).
16. 80% of calls go to voicemail, and 90% of first-time voicemails are never returned (source).
Texting
17. Prospects who are sent text messages convert at a rate of 40% higher (source).
18. However, sending text messages to a prospect prior to making contact on the phone decreased the likelihood of ever contacting that lead by 39% (source).
19. Following with a text message may be what converts your lead! SMS messages can have a clickthrough rate as high as 30.3% with a conversion rate as high as 9.1% (source).
Read More: How NOT to Cold Text Your Sales Prospects
Social Media
20. Sales reps using social selling are 50% more likely to meet or exceed their sales quota (source).
21. 73% of salespeople using social selling as part of their sales process outperform their sales peers and exceeded quota 23% more often (source).
22. 96% of sales professionals use LinkedIn at least once a week and spend an average of 6 hours per week on LinkedIn (source).
Multi-Channel Approach
23. SDRs that leverage a triple touch have 28% higher MQL-to-SQL rates than SDRs that use just phone and email (source).
24. SMS text messages have a 98% open rate, making it a powerful follow-up tactic to combine with email, which has a 22% open rate (source).
Sales Follow Up Cadences
Number of Touches
25. High-growth organizations report an average of 16 touchpoints per prospect, within a 2-4 week span (source).
26. The optimal number of email messages is five (source).
27. Optimal number of call attempts is six; 95% of all converted leads are reached by the sixth call attempt (source).
Sales Follow Up Persistence
28. 50% of sales happen after the 5th (source).
29. The average sales rep only makes 2 attempts to reach a prospect (source).
30. 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up (source).
31. 75% of online buyers want to receive between 2-4 phone calls before a company gives up; 12% would like a company to try as many times as it takes to get a hold of them (source).
32. 92% of salespeople give up after no sales on the 4th call. 60% of customers say no four times before saying yes (source).
33. It takes an average of eight cold call attempts to reach a prospect. In 2007, this average was 3.68 (source).
Sales Follow Up Timing
34. At any given time, only 3% of your market is actively buying; 56% are not ready, while 40% are poised to begin (source).
35. 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first (source).
36. Those who attempted to reach leads within an hour were nearly seven times likelier to have meaningful conversations with decision-makers than those who waited even sixty minutes (source).
37. Following up with web leads within 5 minutes makes you 9 times more likely to engage with them (source).
38. Email opens increase after 12 p.m., with the most active period being between 2PM and 5PM (source).
39. Best time to email prospects is 8AM and 3PM (source).
40. Tuesday emails have the highest open rate compared to other weekdays (source).
41. The best times to call are Wednesdays and Thursdays from 6:45 to 9AM and 4 to 6PM (source).
42. The worst times to call are Mondays from 6AM to noon and Fridays in the afternoon (source).
B2B Data and Effective Sales Follow Up Statistics
43. 71% of sales reps say they spend too much time on data entry (source).
44. On average, data decays about 2% per month, which means more than 20% of your data will become unusable in a year (source).
45. 62% of organizations rely on marketing or prospect data that is 20%-40% incomplete or inaccurate (source).
46. Inaccurate B2B contact data wastes 27.3% of sales reps’ time. That’s 546 hours a year per full-time inside sales rep (source).
47. Inaccurate data has a direct impact on the bottom line of 88% of businesses, with the average company losing 12% of its revenue as a result (source).
48. Companies that employ consistent data hygiene create 700% the number of inquiries and 400% the number of leads than those who do not (source).
49. 42% of sales reps feel they don’t have enough information before making a call (source).
50. 85% of prospects and customers are dissatisfied with their on-the-phone experience (source).
51. It takes 22 minutes to connect using switchboard numbers, but with direct dials it only takes 5 minutes (source).
52. When dialing a direct dial phone number at the director level, your SDR is 46% more likely to connect (source).
53. On top of that, when dialing a direct dial number at the VP level, your SDR is 147% more likely to connect (source).
Contact ZoomInfo today to learn how we can help you improve your B2B sales outreach efforts!
Final Thoughts
Rarely does your first call or email end in a sale, so following up with the buyer is critical. Hopefully these statistics can help you inform your strategy. For more about effective sales, read our tips on overcoming sales objections.