23 Eye-opening Sales Stats All Agents Should Learn from

Do you feel you could do with more sales wisdom to guide you through the intricacies of the sales process? Like all salespeople, agents need to home in on their prospecting, follow-ups, emails, calls and sales productivity skills and techniques. Today, let’s take a look at some of the most interesting sales stats you can put to immediate use and become a better salesperson.

10 sales stats agents can learn from

Sales prospecting and follow-ups

1. If you dread sales prospecting, you’re certainly not alone in. 40% of salespeople name prospecting as the hardest stage in a sales process. (Source)

2. Procrastination leads to missed sales opportunities: more frantic calls at the end of a month/quarter lead to a much lower success rate. (Source)

3. Prepare for a lengthy sales process: on average, it takes 18 calls just to connect with a prospective client. (Source)

4. Email is one of the best channels to connect with clients but it takes a sales rep a lot to succeed: only 23.9% of sales emails are opened. (Source)

5.  Lead response time is crucial and can become a big competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace: only 7% of sales reps respond within the first 5 minutes upon receiving an inquiry. At the same time, 55% of companies took 5+ days to reply or didn’t reply at all!

Sales calls

6. Most sales reps talk too much during phone calls. The listening/talking ratio of the top performers is 46% to 54% while that of average performers is 68% to 32%. (Source)

7. The optimal number of questions to ask during your discovery call is typically 10 to 14. (Source)

8. Do not ask all of your questions at the beginning of the call as it indicates that you’re following the script robotically. Rather, distribute them evenly throughout your conversation so it feels more like a chat. (Source)

9. Successful salespeople use collaborative language more often. This includes pronouns like “we”, “our” and “us” rather than “I”, “you” or “me”.

10. Successful salespeople use confidence-inspiring vocabulary more often too. For example, top sales reps use words like “definitely”, “certainly”, “absolutely”, “exactly right” in 1 out of 10 sentences while average reps use them in only 1 out of 50 sentences.

Referrals

11. Of 10 purchasing decisions, 9 occur due to a peer recommendation. (Source)

12. 92% of people trust referrals from their acquaintances. (Source)

13. 84% of buyers start the buying process from a referral. (Source)

14. 83% of people are eager to give a referral after getting a positive experience but only 29% of sales reps do ask for them.

Sales productivity

15. The most widely used sales tools is a CRM, email, phone, social media, data services and sales cadence. (Source)

16. An average salesperson spends 34% of their workday talking to prospects and selling. Writing emails takes 21%, data entry – 17%, prospecting – 17%, internal meetings – 12%, scheduling meetings – 12%, training – 11%, reading industry news/learning new tips – 11%. (Source)

17. Customers have clear expectations as to what makes a great customer experience:

• listening to their needs (69%);
• not being pushy (61%);
• providing useful info (61%);
• responding quickly (51%). (Source)

18. The biggest sales challenges reps are facing are:

• spending too much time on administrative or non-selling activities (49%);
• closing win-win deals (20%);
• creating a targeted prospecting strategy (17%). (Source)

Sales emails

19. Email has higher organic reach. A message is 5x more likely to be seen and read via email than via Facebook where organic reach is just 1% compared to email’s 79%. (Source)

20. “Email is 40 times more effective in acquiring new customers than social giants like Facebook or Twitter”. (Source)

21. ROI (return on investment) for email marketing is about 3800% (Direct Marketing Association). In absolute numbers, this means email ROI is $38 per $1 spent.

22. 66% of users say they made a purchase as a result of email marketing. (Source)

23. Sales reps who segment and target their emails generate 58% of all revenue. (Source)

Wrapping up

Some of these sales stats are quite eye-opening, right? From earning referrals to increasing sales productivity, agents have plenty to learn and improve but as long as you stay open-minded and challenge each sales technique, you will undoubtedly get better each step of the way.