You need to stay updated with the latest sales statistics for setting up your goals, defining the KPIs, and measuring the performance metrics of your sales team. But, the sales statistics frequently change depending on the buyer’s behavior and sellers’ persona, economic conditions, and market sentiments to reflect trends.
So to keep you productive high throughout the year, we have curated the latest and credible sales statistics from different research reports, analytical articles, and case studies of top-notch industries that can help you in building the best data-driven sales strategies for your business.
Sales statistics to boost your sales team productivity
The sales team focuses on various strategies, techniques, and enablement functions to move towards constant growth. To help you focus on different stages and functions of the sales process, we are dividing the article into respective categories.
1. Outbound sales statistics
Most of the B2B companies adopt the outbound sales process to scale in their business. They use cold emails, cold calls, and frequent follow-ups to achieve consistent growth.
Below we are listing some of the latest B2B outbound sales statistics in various categories.
1.1. Cold email statistics
Cold email is one of the most widely used outbound sales methods. It is because:
- 64% of customers prefer email as the best mode of communication with the seller.
- The average benchmark of the cold email response rate is around 30%.
Following the best practices of cold emailing can give you even better results such as:
- 71% of consumers believe personalized experiences would influence their decision to interact with emails (higher response rate).
- Tuesdays and Thursdays are found to provide the best click-through rate for the sales cold email campaign.
Read More: The Ultimate Guide to Build Successful Inside Sales Teams
1.2. Email Subject Line Statistics
- The email subject line is one of the crucial factors affecting the performance of sales emails. 47% of recipients open their emails based on the subject line alone.
- The subject line with 6-7 words provides a 10% click to open rate. Adding emojis in the subject line can boost the open rate by 609%.
- 60% of email experts believe sentence case in email subject line provides good results whereas only 6% believe it to be in lower case.
- Focus on the preheader after your email subject line. Emails with a preheader get much higher average open rates – 27.82% vs 21.46%.
1.3. Cold call statistics
It’s not completely true when salespeople say prospects are not accepting their meeting requests and lack interest with regards to their products and services. According to a recent survey of Rain Sales Training, 69% of buyers accept cold calls from new sales reps. This shows the cold call is still an effective mode of selling.
However, to succeed in cold calls, you need to follow the best practices according to the latest trends:
- The research by Gong says the average duration of a successful cold call is 5 minutes 50 seconds. Time duration less than that might provide poor results.
- Eventually, it’s also found that the best time to make a cold call is 9 am in the call recipient’s local time zone.
1.4. Follow-up statistics
Sales follow-up statistics are the essential attributes of outbound sales methodology. 46% of leads require 3-5 touchpoints before getting qualified as a prospect.
There are some more interesting statistics of follow-up strategies that can drop your jaws and make you change your strategy now.
- 61% of the first contact happens over email, followed by 6% on a phone call. This clearly establishes that cold email follow-ups are much more efficient than cold calling.
- 80% of sales require 5 follow-ups after the initial contact. However, 44% of salespeople give up after 1 follow-up.
- According to Saleshandy Whitepaper, sending up to 9 stages of follow-up emails after the primary email increases the email open rate by 53.49% and the email reply rate by 44.73%
2. Inbound sales statistics
Inbound sales strategies are implemented by companies to increase brand value and grab organic leads. It includes buyers searching for the solution on different platforms and landing on your solution page. These leads are taken up by sales reps for further nurturing and moving towards closure.
2.1. Organic lead statistics
- While businesses focus on inbound sales methodologies, increasing organic leads through websites and landing pages becomes a top priority. According to a report by Unbounce, the average conversion rate of MQLs to SQLs from landing pages is 9.7%.
- Organic lead is considered one of the best lead generation channels and scoring techniques, making 53% of marketers spend at least half of their budget on generating leads organically.
- 64% of teams that use inbound selling reach their quotas as opposed to 49% of sales teams who use only outbound sales
2.2. Lead nurturing statistics
- According to Marketo’s report, with proper lead nurturing, companies can extract 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.
- But, 96% of the visitors on your website are unsure of their buying decisions.
- The above statistics display that businesses need to focus on their hardpoints to get success. 53% say content engagement is the biggest obstacle to lead nurturing, whereas 44% say it’s personalization in marketing efforts.
- 66% of respondents in a survey saw a measurable difference in the results of their nurtured leads versus non-nurtured leads.
3. Sales prospecting statistics
- 34% of sales reps say prospecting and lead qualification is the biggest challenge in 2020.
- To overcome these challenges, the sales reps need to use multiple sales prospecting tools for research and automation jobs.
- About 89.9% of companies use two or more lead enrichment tools to fulfill sales research needs.
- 57.3% of Sales Operations teams in a survey claimed to be using some form of a Lead Intelligence and Lead Generation tool for their prospecting needs.
- Sales Leaders of different companies claim that they could successfully schedule meetings for 52% of their prospects.
- 47% of top performers in companies claim to achieve their individual sales goals.
4. Sales cycle statistics
Managing the sales cycle is a deciding factor towards the productivity of the sales team. Every organization tries to reduce the sales cycle length and close more deals. While analyzing the sales cycle statistics, we found the following results:
- 38.4% of B2B sales happen over a sales cycle of 3 months.
- Only 5 to 10% of qualified leads will actually turn into an opportunity.
- In the case of inbound leads, 60 to 65% are qualified but not ready to buy.
- Organizations can increase their success by 20-30% by clearly defining sales stages in a pipeline.
- With rigid prospecting techniques, 25 to 33% of opportunities in a B2B environment will close at the expected close date.
5. Sales closure statistics
Sales closure is the most vital stage of the sales cycle that directly relates to the sales reps and organization revenue’s end goals. The average sales closure rate is 19%.
The sales team tries to have a smooth sales cycle for their prospects, but 55% of drop-offs happen in the opportunity stage because they are not technically fit.
6. Referral sales statistics
Referral sales strategies have a significant impact on customer’s buying decisions and retention rates.
- Referrals help in reinforcing trust and leads are 4X more likely to buy when referred by a friend.
- It’s found that companies have 16% higher LTV from referred customers.
- Hubspot research claims that customers recommended/referred to businesses were 18% more likely to stay with companies.
7. Social sales statistics
Social selling is the latest trend arising in the business ecosystem with booming results. Social sales leaders create 45% more opportunities than peers.
Upon analyzing different social selling channels, we found LinkedIn gets the highest B2B sales conversions.
Trade shows are the second-largest source of B2B revenue, with around 40000 million USD.
Although social selling provides remarkable results, the majority of salespeople use less than 10% of their time on social media to sell.
8. Sales training statistics
- Companies go for continuous sales training to make their sales reps outperform in their regular tasks. Companies spend almost 15 billion US$ per year for training purposes.
- Still, it has been a great challenge for the new salespeople to implement their learnings afterward. 90% of sales training initiatives have no lasting impact after 120 days.
- On asking the sales reps in a survey by Pipedrive regarding their learning sources, 92% of sales reps believe they learn the sales skills during the job.
Conclusion
The above B2B sales statistics must have surprised you. But, that’s how it is. These numbers can help you compare the performance of your sales processes and work on the next set of goals. We believe now you can implement the above statistics and design a high performing sales engine to boost your revenue and productivity.
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