The 4 Most Frustrating Sales Acceleration Stats

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african american business professional who is frustrated with sales; sitting at wooden desk near laptop

Selling isn’t easy. Accelerating sales is even harder. In a position where you often fail more frequently than succeed, it can be very easy to get frustrated with the sales process. 

To illustrate just how difficult it can be to drive more business, we compiled a list of the most frustrating sales acceleration stats for business development professionals.

  1. 33% of sales calls are a complete waste of time. When salespeople are provided with poor information, they often end up chasing unqualified leads who never had a chance of converting. 
  2. It takes an average of 25 phone calls to make just one sale. Making 24 calls that don’t go anywhere can certainly lead to frustration,  but that one extra call can easily make up for all the hassle.
  3. Half of all sales leads go to the company who responds first to a potential client / customer inquiry, but only 40% of leads are contacted within the first hour. Does your company respond to leads fast enough?
  4. 44% of sales teams abandon leads after just one outreach attempt, but 80% of leads take 5 to 12 tries to win the deal.

The List Could Be Much Longer

We picked these top four frustrating sales acceleration stats out of an ever-growing pile of potential metrics. This concentrated sample explains how hard it can be for sales teams to lose motivation and confidence in their selling ability. Understanding that these stats are commonplace can help, but improving the stats is a better solution. But how?

Accelerating sales requires the ability to better identify the leads that are most likely to convert, and those that are worth the most to your business. Even small changes in the stats above can have a big impact on your sales success. 

If 33% of your leads are currently a waste of time, reducing this to just 30% already increases your effectiveness by 10%. Improving your conversion rate from one out of 25 calls that lead to sales into two out of 25 is a 50% increase. Add these two “small” changes together and your sales process just got 112% more effective. Let’s do the math…

If just 66% of your leads are worth the time, and you convert at a rate of 4% (1/25), you can expect 26.4 sales for every 1,000 inquiries.

If you can improve this to have 70% qualified leads, and a contact to conversion rate of 8% (2/25), you can expect 56 sales for every 1,000 inquiries. What a difference!

Improving Your Stats One Sale at a Time

There are a variety of sales acceleration tools available on the market today that can help you improve the stats for your business. Most come in the form of software that helps better identify leads that aren’t worth your time, and focus on those that do. 

But even the best software solutions need people power to close deals and make sales. We always strongly recommend that businesses who use PIPELINEPLUS also take advantage of our sales training services to make the most of the technology.

Interested? Contact us today to learn more.