B2B Sales Benchmarks. Compare Yourself to your Peers & Discover the Best Tactics and Channels that Drive Revenue

Transcription

1 Compare Yourself to your Peers & Discover the Best Tactics and Channels that Drive Revenue

2 1 13% of leads convert to opportunities, which takes on average 84 days. 6% of opportunities convert to deals which takes an additional 18 days. Implisit analyzed the pipelines of hundreds of companies to discover the channels that deliver the highest conversion rate, to help you benchmarks your sales performance against your peers. The analysis shows that the best channel is employee and customer referrals. On average it takes 84 days to convert a lead to an opportunity and 18 days to convert an opportunity to a deal. How is your Sales team doing, as compared to your peers? Is your marketing team focusing on the right channels? Are you closing enough deals, or leaving money on the table? To answer all of these questions Implisit analyzed anonymous aggregated data from hundreds of companies to find out which channels deliver the highest conversion rate. Overall, results show that 13% of leads convert to opportunities across channels and that it takes about 84 days to convert a lead to an opportunity. Further down the sales funnel, only 6% of opportunities convert to from opportunity to deal, with average time-to-conversion of 18 days. Overall lead to deal conversion rate is 0.8%, which means that it takes over 128 leads to close one deal. 13% Lead to 84 days 6% Opportunity 18 days opportunity B2B Sales Funnel It takes an average of 84 days to convert 13% of leads into opportunities. Then, the decision process is much faster: it takes 18 days to convert an opportunity to a deal, but only 6% of opportunities end up closing. to deal time to conversion time to conversion

3 2 Customer and employee referrals is the best performing channel with 3.63% conversion rate, followed by company websites with 1.55% conversion rate Referrals work best When analyzing conversion rate by channel, one channel emerges as a clear winner. Customer and employee referrals generate 3.63% conversion rate, almost double than the next channel websites with 1.55% conversion rate. Social has 1.47% conversion rate and paid search 0.99%. The worst performing channels are lead lists with 0.02% conversion rate, events with 0.04% conversion rate and campaigns with 0.07% conversion rate. Invest in employee & customer referrals, your website and social media 3.63% Invest in your employee and customer referral programs referrals get the highest conversion rate 3.6%. Leads from the company website and social channels get around 1.5% conversion rate. The worst performing channels are lead lists, company events and campaigns. 1.47% Lead-to-Deal Conversion Rate 0.78% 0.34% 0.02% 0.04% 0.07% Lead list Events Campaign LinkedIn 0.44% Webinar 0.48% 0.94% 0.99% 1.55% 1.07% 0.55% Partner Tradeshows Markeitng & Sales Paid Search Advertising generated Other Facebook / Website Customer & Twitter / Employee Other Social Referrals

4 3 Another interesting finding is that leads from channels with high conversion rate typically also become customers faster. Employee and customer referrals take 97 days to close, on average. Website leads take 76 days and social leads 42 days. The worst performing channels, lead lists and campaigns, take the longest to close over 160 days, on average. Leads with best deal rate - close fast Social, website and employee referral have the above average conversion rate and have the shortest time to close. Lead lists, campaigns, tradeshows and webinars have below average conversion rate and take more time to close. WORST LEAD SOURCES Lead list 160 Campaign Tradeshows 140 Sales generated Other 120 Webinar Customer & Employee Referral Paid Search Website Events Marketing & Advertising Facebook / Twitter / Other Social Partner 40 BEST LEAD SOURCES Time from Lead to Deal (Days) % 0.5% 1.0% 1.5% 2.0% 2.5% 3.0% 3.5% Lead-to-Deal Conversion Rate Webinars create opportunities, but fewer deals When we separated the funnel into opportunities and deals, we found that some channels create more opportunities but these opportunities fail to convert to deals. For example, webinars have 17.8% conversion rate from lead to opportunity, but only 2.5% conversion rate from opportunity to deal. On the other hand, only 0.9% of leads from campaigns convert to opportunities; however, 7.8% of these opportunities convert to deals well above average. 4.0%

5 4 Company events have the lowest ratio of closed-won opportunities. Opportunities in the CRM have typically been pre-qualified by sales reps. Therefore, we were surprised to find significant variation in the share of closed-won versus closed lost opportunities. Implisit s analysis shows that this ratio may vary from 7.6% to 68.7%. In fact, company events, which may seem lots of fun, have the lowest ratio of closed won opportunities 7.6%, followed by lead lists with 15.5%. Webinars convert to opportunities, but don t close Some channels are easier to convert to opportunities, but it does not mean that they generate more revenue. 18% of webinars attendees are converted to opportunities, but only 2.5% of those close. 31% of website inquiries are converted to opportunities but only 5% of these close. Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate 31.3% Opportunity-to-Deal Conversion Rate 5.0% Website 24.7% Customer & Employee Referral 17.8% 17.2% 15.3% 14.3% 13.9% 13.9% 12.4% 10.0% Webinar 14.7% 2.5% 8.5% Facebook / Twitter / Other Social 5.1% Markeitng & Advertising 6.9% 7.7% 6.8% Paid Search Other Sales generated 4.4% 4.9% 5.3% Tradeshows Partner 6.5% 4.2% 2.5% 0.9% LinkedIn Events Lead list 1.0% 0.9% 7.8% Campaign

6 5 Conclusion Overall, it seems that lead source has a major impact on conversion rate. There are two things that sales and marketing organizations can do in order to act on these insights. First, they should strive to get more leads from the best performing channels, an second, they should put their closers on leads from the best preforming channels in order to maximize conversion rate. The 0.8% conversion rate from lead to deal shows the grinding work that reps have to do on a daily basis in order to meet their organization s revenue target. However, it looks like even the best sales reps can do better with leads from the best channels. About Implisit Implisit updates your prospect and customer communications to the appropriate CRM record, letting you manage your pipeline more effectively while saving you and your team valuable time on tedious tasks. The result is better pipeline management and more accurate forecasts. Schedule your demo today at Implisit 2015