Trust Enablement

Improving Sales Performance with Enablement Recruiting, Consulting, Outsourcing, Coaching, and Insights on Strategies, Tactics, and Tools

90+ Marketing, Customer Success, and Sales Statistics

Are you looking for the latest business statistics to drive your go-to-market decision-making? I put together this article to capture my favorite, up-to-date, sales, marketing, customer success, operations, support, and sales enablement statistics — and share them with you.

If you find yourself hunting for a statistic, and cannot find it here, let me know, and I’ll track it down.

Experience Related Statistics

Customer Experience Matters

According to research by Right Now (now part of Oracle):

  • 86 percent of consumers will pay more for a better customer experience.
  • 89 percent of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience.

You can’t afford to deliver negative experiences.

Oh wait, there’s more.  According to ValueSelling Associates, B2B buyers don’t trust salespeople (60% don’t trust sellers).

What About the B2B Buying Experience?

According to Gartner:

  • On average, there are 6-10 decision-makers involved.
  • Each member of the buying committee has four-five pieces of information they bring to the process that they are working to more deeply understand and confirm.
  • 77% of B2B buyers felt that their last purchase was too difficult/complex.
What do customers want to discuss on the first sales call?

According to a Hubspot survey of 500+ consumers in Q1 of 2016, more than 50% of them want to receive a sales demo.

Marketing Stats

Experiential Marketing Statistics
  1. According to Statista, only 7% of consumers prefer TV ads to live events.
  2. Also, from Statista, 79% drive sales from events (a form of experiential marketing).
  3. 78% of millennials, according to Harris Group, want to spend money on experiences and events vs. other types of purchases.
  4. Hubspot notes that 65% of brands that use experiential marketing see a boost in sales.
  5. According to SEMRush, brands delivering positive experiences receive three times the word-of-mouth awareness of those that fail to do so.
  6. Big Eye Agency noted that 85% of consumers are more likely to buy from a business after participating in an event or experience, and 70% become repeat customers. (source, event marketer)
  7. Marketing Week notes that 48% of buyers are more likely to purchase if they can try a product first.
  8. Per Salesforce, 92% of consumers expect personalized experiences — you are falling behind if you don’t deliver.
  9. According to Bizzabo, virtual events are working, at least somewhat, with 58% of attendees attending the entire event.
Advertising Stats
Marketing Data

According to eMarketer and research performed by Experian:

  • More than 20% of companies surveyed believe that more than half of their customer data is wrong.
  • Around 30% of customer data that marketers use is wrong.

We have serious data problems.

 

Email Marketing

According to research by Experian:

  • 59% of business-to-business marketers say email is their most effective channel in terms of revenue generation.
  • 56% of brands that use emojis in their subject lines had a higher open rate.

The ROI of email marketing is, according to data from Litmus, 36 to 1.  In other words, invest $1 in your email marketing and you get back $36.  That’s powerful.

ROI of email marketing

The Power of Customer Reviews

According to research by PowerReviews:

  • Nearly 100% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase at least some of the time.
  • And, in the same research, 95% of buyers feel online reviews are an essential resource for decision-making.

And, in additional research, also by PowerReviews, they note that “almost all shoppers—95%— reported consulting customer reviews” before making a purchase.

Additional research from Spiegel speaks further to the power of reviews, noting:

  • It only takes five reviews to increase your chance of purchase.  Offerings with 5 reviews were 270% more likely to be purchased than those without reviews.
Why Nurture Leads?

David M. Raab, on his Customer Experience Matrix blog, notes a couple of really important statistics to support the importance of lead nurturing.  I’ll quote him:

Market2Lead (before they were absorbed by Oracle) told me they had analyzed their own customers’ data and found:

• 9% higher average deal size for nurtured leads vs. non-nurtured leads

• 23% shorter deal time for nurtured than non-nurtured leads.

 

Sales Statistics

Cold Calling Stats

Consider these statistics as you consider your cadences:

  • Per Pipeline – The average voicemail response rate for cold calls comes in just under 5%
  • Per SalesHacker – the statistics look better, sitting at 11%, 22%, and 33% for your first, second, and third attempts respectively.
  • Per The Brevet Group, it takes 8 cold calls to reach a prospect.
  • According to Sales Insights Lab, more than 50% of your prospects are not a good fit for your solution.
How many calls should I make per day?

According to SalesBuzz, the average rep should make around 60 calls per day, spending at least 3 hours per day on the phone.

We’ve seen stats reported between 40 and 60 per day, with some extreme outliers reporting 100+.  In our opinion and experience, this leads to poorly researched outreach and diminished results.  50-60 per day is the best target in most cases.

How Many Touches does it take to…?

The Brevet Group state above shows us that it takes 8 cold calls to reach a prospect, how many touches does it take to…

Sales Forecasting

According to research by InsightSquared and RevOps Squared, more than 68% of companies report missing their sales forecast by more than 10%.

You can learn more about sales forecasting and forecast accuracy in our article.

Quota Attainment

According to Forrester, only 47% of B2B sellers achieve their quota goals.

 

Percentage of sales time spent actively selling

Pick your favorite study, and you will see that reps only spend about 33% of their time selling. The rest is spent on:

  • Administrative tasks (CRM updates)
  • Creating and searching for content
  • Email, non-customer meetings

Various studies come from Salesforce, CSO Insights (no longer in existence), and others typically all come back with the same results.

Note that, in an interview with Enablement at Microsoft we found teams spending less than 30% of their time in sales meetings.

 

This time, based upon our ROI analysis, gave us the following typical time-spent breakdown for your sales reps

  • 5% of time searching for content.
  • 25% of the time creating content.
  • 37% of the time performing administrative tasks.
  • 33% of time spent on selling.
How much time is spent deciding who to call next?

According to the team at InsideSales, they have worked with companies where reps spend as much as 40% of their time deciding who they should call next.

How’s that for wasting time?

Especially given that response time matters.  InsideSales also notes that between 35 and 50% of deals are won by the seller that responds first.

Customer Success and Churn Stats

What’s an acceptable churn rate?

16Ventures uses 5-7% as an acceptable annual churn rate.  How do you compare?

Focusing on existing customers is rewarding

According to research from McKinsey, companies that focus on existing customers as much as acquiring new ones, see a median net retention rate of 20%.  In other words, they grow 20% per year without acquiring any new customers.

Experian points to data from the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, noting:

  • Loyal customers have a lifetime value of up to 10 times as much as their initial purchase.
  • Acquiring a new customer can be up to 7 times more expensive than keeping a current one.

Sales Enablement Statistics

According to G2, here are a couple of key sales enablement benefits that should help you understand why is sales enablement important.

  • Sales enablement’s presence correlates with a 31% improvement in supporting changes in sales messaging and a 15% improvement in improving low-performing salespeople.
  • Organizations with sales enablement achieve a 49% win rate on forecasted deals, compared to 42.5% for those without.

These statistics are a great reminder of the sales enablement benefits when it is deployed in a formal and mature manner.

 

Sales Training Statistics

Review the Surrounded Learner Technique to maximize your investment in Sales Training. Otherwise, you are wasting time and money.

 

Sales training has a demonstrable ROI (sometimes)

Accenture’s Return on Learning: Training for High Performance at Accenture calculated the company reaped a 353% return on its learning investment. This study occurred in 2006.

This sales training statistic is used far too often and is misleading. Sales training, unless done with the full coverage model of the Surrounded Learner Technique, will never achieve these results en masse.

New hire onboarding doesn’t happen everywhere

In one Chorus study, nearly 35% of sales leaders indicated that new team members receive little to no sales training.

Whether you have a dedicated sales enablement team or not, it pays to formalize your onboarding program.

Insight on Training from Salesforce

These are excellent sales training statistics from Salesforce’s state of sales 4th edition:

  • 64% of sales leaders are reskilling existing employees to meet changing business needs.
  • 62% of companies use sales training and coaching tools, up from 55% in 2018.
  • Sales Teams’ Top-Ranked Tactics for Success over the Next 12 Months, sitting in 7th place for sales leaders, is revised sales staff training. Sales Training is also the 7th ranked priority for outside and inside sellers and sales operations.
The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve

People lose 80 to 90% of what they learn after one month. Research about memory consistently demonstrates the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve’s accuracy; training humans can be a lot like pouring water into a pail filled with holes.

The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve

To maximize the value of training, you must provide regular reinforcement at specific intervals after the initial training, or the value of the activity itself is minimal.

This is one of the most important enablement statistics to keep in mind.

Sales Coaching Statistics
Focus your coaching on the average performers

The impact of Sales Coaching is compelling.  Harvard Business Review noted, several years ago, that “The real payoff from good coaching lies among the middle 60% — your core performers. For this group, the best-quality coaching can improve performance up to 19%.”

The article went so far as to note that coaching your top and worse performers is generally ineffective. The benefits come from focusing on this middle group.

Coaching is the most powerful tactic

CSO Insights had reported in its series on the state of sales enablement that Sales Coaching, when formalized, had the most significant impact, creating higher win rates and quota attainment.

On the other hand, CSO Insights also noted that random sales coaching led to lower win rates. If you are going to do it, do it properly.

Put in the time to get the benefits

Dave Kurlan shared that sales managers who devote at least 50% of their time to coaching have salespeople who score 13% better in Qualifying and 24% better in closing than the salespeople whose sales managers rarely coach.

Sales coaching statistics are consistently stating one thing clearly – invest in coaching.

Formal Coaching is Critical

According to CSO Insights, in 2016, nearly 3 in 4 sales organizations wasted use of random and informal coaching approaches, and only about one-quarter leveraged formal and dynamic coaching.   Only formal and dynamic coaching results in positive outcomes.

Sales Content

One of the sales enablement benefits most often discuss is that it becomes easier for sales teams to find content and for your team to create the right content in the first place.

Your organization likely invests a lot of money in developing content for your sales teams, but are you sure you are building the right content for sales needs?

Taking it further, is that content easy to find to use at the right time during the buying journey?

In many organizations, product marketing, content marketers, other salespeople, and those across the business create so much content to help the sales department that you often find they are drowning under the weight of all this help.

Not sure that matters?

Let’s dig into some of my favorite enablement statistics around sales content.

They can’t find the content they need

According to Upland Software, 65% of content developed for sales is never used; they can’t find it. Your content marketing efforts are often being wasted.

And, according to the 2018 B2B Content Marketing Report, companies spend, on average, 26% of their marketing budget on content (with the most successful spending more than 40%).

Deals are closed when content is provided at each stage of the buying journey.

Hubspot notes that 95% of buyers purchase from the seller, giving them content at every stage of their buying process.

Organizational Alignment and Cross-Functional Collaboration
Sales and Marketing Alignment pays off

Hubspot reported 208% higher marketing revenue for well-aligned sales and marketing teams

Aberdeen notes 41% better growth towards quota goals when issues with marketing misalignment are corrected.

Overall organization misalignment has even greater costs

Research has demonstrated that the cost is both measurable and significant:

Sales Enablement Discipline and Metrics

What you measure is what you impact

According to research from PROLIFIQ, 47% of sales enablement teams don’t measure the ROI of their efforts. [5/22 Update – The link to this research is broken, but leaving the data for now.]

The 55/38/7 communication rule states “55% of communication is body language, 38% is the tone of voice, and 7% is the actual words spoken.”

 

Employee Retention

Even your satisfied employees are looking for new jobs

According to research by SBI, reported in Harvard Business Review:

“Almost half (41%) of the sales professionals surveyed reported job satisfaction but are still searching for a new job, and 44% of satisfied high performers are actively on the hunt.”

And other studies from past research traditionally point to somewhere between 1 in 3 and 1 in 4 sellers leaving every year.

What does turnover rate mean to you in reality? For every ten sellers in your sales organizations, 3 of them will be gone within the next 12 months.

When reps leave, you are going to pay dearly

Data from SiriusDecisions estimates that the cost of seller turnover is around $200,000, between lost opportunity cost, retraining, hiring, and so forth.

And, according to research from Gartner in August of 2022, nearly 90% of sellers feel burned out from work.

The costs of bad hires

Sales turnover is, perhaps, more expensive than with other employees, but it’s not cheap by any means.  According to reporting by HR.com:

  • A bad hire will cost approximately 30% of their annual salary (original source was the Department of Labor, could not track down the report).
  • Employers lose nearly 80% of negligent hiring cases, each with an average settlement of $1M.

Hiring the right fit matters — a lot.

How Long Does It Take A Seller to Ramp Up?

The average ramp time for sellers will vary across businesses, varying based on:

  • How ramp is defined.  Is it time-to-first-sale, conversation, or some other achievement?
  • Average deal duration is often an excellent data point to consider.  Until a seller experiences a full sales cycle can they be considered fully ramped?

Research from qVidian in 2015 reported that 71% of all sellers took longer than 6 months to be ramped.

 

Awareness – Based on search volume and trends

For this part of the analysis, we use our favorite SEO tool, ahrefs.

Enablement Awareness

Sales Enablement has risen to around 6000 searches a month. The growth in search volume aligns well with the growing interest in the profession.

Revenue Enablement, on the other hand, continues to hover at around 150 searches a month.

What does this mean?

While we are seeing many more people discuss Revenue Enablement, and use the job title, most content available today continues to refer to Sales Enablement.

Operations Awareness

Revenue Operations is winning the terms race over Sales Operations, but it’s very close. We expect to see Revenue Operations continue to grow in popularity and these numbers are likely to change significantly over the next couple of years.

If we combine searches for Revenue Operations and RevOps we see a combined search volume of over 3100 a month. The rate of growth is impressive, with Revenue Operations being the more popular search term.

Revenue Operations Search Volume – Trending
RevOps Search Volume – Trending

Note, in comparison, that Sales Operations search volume is flat at around 2100 searches a month and salesops is only searched around 50 times per month.

Jobs – Titles and Openings

Does any of the above translate into employment?

Heck, yeah!

Enablement Jobs

Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator and searching for profiles with the term “Sales Enablement”, “Revenue Enablement, or “Growth Enablement” in their job title currently comes in with just over 15,000+ people.

That is 2000+ more than we found in July of 2021.

Operations Jobs

Using both Revenue and Sales Operations for this analysis, we find more than 160,000 people with these job titles on LinkedIn!

False, Misleading, or Misunderstood Stats

67 percent of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally – SiriusDecisions

This stat, attributed to Sirius Decisions, had to be further clarified but has lived on in the echo chamber of the internet every since.  While the blog post to clarify the stat is no longer available, we dug it up from the internet way back machine so readers can better understand the original context and judge for themselves.

Impact of the Great Resignation

According to Fast Company, “83% of Millennials have had to take on up to six new tasks outside of their job descriptions due to their coworkers resigning.”

Technology Adoption

CRM Statistics

  • In research from 2013, BuyerZone notes that “91% of companies with more than 11 employees use CRM software”

The Uneven Communication Problem

Meetings can be critical for success in all go-to-market roles, what do we know about them?

The Uneven Communication Problem, discussed on this HBR podcast by Leigh Thompson, professor at Kellogg School of Management and author of “Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration”, points to a few key factors we need to be aware of:

  • In most meetings, 60% of the conversation is dominated by two people
  • In most meetings, 70% of the conversation is dominated by three people
  • In fact, the minority of the people take up 80% of the meeting, leaving the quieter majority without time to weigh in.

In this video interview with Professor Thompson, she discusses how her brainwriting technique can help overcome the uneven communication problem.

Remote vs Face-to-Face Preferences

This infographic, at GreatBusinessSchools.org from the early 2010s, demonstrate that there has long been a conflict between wanting to work remotely, and in some cases, feeling more effective in person.

According to the research that went into this infographic:

  • 83% of employees worked remotely sometimes.
  • 95% said face-to-face meetings were essential to long-term business relationships.
  • 84% of people prefer in-person business meetings.

We know some of these numbers have changed as a result of the pandemic, the real question is if the change is permanent or temporary.

More recent data from Gallup, at the end of 2021, indicates that for white-collar workers, which the majority of go-to-market teams are considered:

  • 41% work from home full-time
  • 26% work from home part-time
  • And roughly 30% of workers said they would look for work if their employer forced them to work full-time in the office again.

But we do know that in-person is more effective communication.  We refer to the 55/38/7 rule above, and this infographic did too, noting:

The 55/38/7 communication rule states “55% of communication is body language, 38% is the tone of voice, and 7% is the actual words spoken.”

So, face-to-face communications are vital for business success.  If you are in a customer-facing role, you need to leverage this knowledge as often as you can to beat out your competitors who are staying at home.

Industry-Specific Stats

Retail
Researching Products On Mobile While In-Store

According to research by Salsify, 77% of shoppers use their mobile phones to find information about products WHILE shopping in a store.

What did we leave out?

Why is sales enablement important?

Hopefully, you have a better sense now than you did at the beginning of this article.

What metrics should we have included?

One thought on “90+ Marketing, Customer Success, and Sales Statistics

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.