It’s easy to get anxious about whether or not your sales performance is up to scratch. You put in the hours, the effort and the sweat, but how do you know whether you and your team are on the right track and what areas you can improve on to make even more sales? Like most aspects of marketing, data is what’s needed – that’s why in this blog I’m going to run through six sales statistics that B2B sales managers need to be aware of if they want to improve their team’s sales performance.
1) Your team is 56% more likely to reach their quota if they contact a buyer before the buyer contacts them
Sales Benchmark Index claim that if your sales team reach out to a prospect before they reach out to them, there’s a 56% higher chance that your team will reach their sales targets. And why’s that? Because if a salesperson contacts a lead with the intention of getting to know them, finding out their pain points and creating a relationship, they’re in a better position to offer solutions to them. If your team is able to convey the value your brand can deliver to the lead, the lead is far more likely to buy – for obvious reasons. What’s more, you’ve saved your lead the hassle of getting in touch with your sales team.
2) 80% of sales require five follow up calls after a meeting
Marketing Wizdom founder, Robert Clay (writing on Marketing Donut) reckons that perseverance is the key to making sales. After all, only 2% of sales are made on the first hit, so your sales team should not be falling at the first hurdle. If they’re going to surpass targets and get their own sales statistics up, they need to be tenacious. The fact that 44% of sales people give up after the first call is alarming, especially given that 80% of sales require around five follow up calls. As mentioned in the previous point, these follow up calls build trust and create a relationship between a lead and sales, and prospects are far more likely to buy from a brand they trust.
3) Only 30% of buyers make purchasing decisions to gain something – 70% make buying decisions to solve a problem
These sales statistics speak reams about what motivates the buying decisions of the majority of people your sales team are trying to target. If your sales team have a better understanding of what makes their prospects come to a buying decision, they can mould their conversations with these prospects to their needs. The first step is to determine which camp their lead falls into. If they’re looking to solve a problem, your team can focus on discovering what that problem is and then determine how your brand can help. If the lead wants to gain something, your team needs to know how to leverage your brand in a way that’ll make the lead realise it can help them achieve what they want.
4) Your sales team is nine times more likely to convert a web lead if they follow up within five minutes
Possibly one of the most surprising of the sales statistics we’ve covered so far, this stat from Inside Sales that appeared in HubSpot’s list of 107 Mind-Blowing Sales Statistics is definitely one that your sales team needs to know about. A web lead is generated after a visitor to your website fills out a form. Their contact details and any other pertinent information (such as location, company and job title) is then passed onto your sales team who have the opportunity to start a conversation with them. If your sales team develop a habit of contacting web leads the moment (literally) they see them come in, they have a far greater chance as improving their conversion rates.
5) Nurtured leads spend 47% more than non-nurtured leads
Another stat from HubSpot’s list of sales statistics by The Annuitas Group, the finding that nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than leads who haven’t been nurtured should be another motivating factor in getting your sales team to change their approach to closing more deals. Nurtured leads are ones that have already had plenty of contact – through content, email marketing or calls – with your brand. They’ve had time to get to know your brand and products, and have established a relationship with the business. No wonder then that they’re prepared to spend more. Collecting data about leads during the lead nurturing process is so important: it indicates how likely a lead is to convert, and whether the marketing department should send them over to your sales team.
6) An average of seven people in a firm with 100 to 500 employees make most buying decisions
Appearing in Marketing Blender’s list of B2B Buyer Statistics 2016, Gartner Research found that in companies with 100-500 employees, only seven people make the majority of buying decisions. For this reason, your sales team needs to become savvy about identifying who those seven people and their buying criteria are during preliminary sales calls. During these calls, the chances are that your team will only talk to someone working beneath a key decision maker – in this case, they need to determine whether the person they’re talking to can persuade the decision maker to get on a call with your sales team. If they can, they’ll be armed and ready with information from the first calls about this decision maker, and will be far more likely to convince them that your brand can add value to them.
GCL has been helping sales teams source the right leads with marketing data for over 25 years. For advice about closing leads during a sales pitch, download our guide:
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