The sales industry doesn’t lack competition. So it’s no wonder every executive and sales op wants to know how their conversion rates compare to the rest of the market. This isn’t competition for competition’s sake. Benchmarking your conversion rates to an industry average can highlight the areas you need to improve.
Finding a good benchmark isn’t easy. But this article aims to rectify that.
Below, you’ll find analysis of our B2B sales conversion rates and the B2B conversion rates of other sales departments. Use them to measure how well you’re converting meetings and closing deals.
What counts as a conversion rate?
You can measure conversion rates at any stage of your funnel. Overwhelmingly, sales executives and sales ops will get hung up on their meetings to deals conversion rate, but there’s no reason not to calculate conversion rates at every stage of your sales funnel.
For instance, you may want to take a broad view and calculate the conversion rate of pre-sales meetings booked to deals closed. Using this ratio, you can work out how many meetings your BDRs will need to book for you to close a deal on average. This is an excellent way to set targets for sales staff and track how much each team member improves.
“You can measure conversion rates at any stage of your funnel.”
EngageTechs’s inbound marketing conversion rates
Here are our outbound conversion rates for every stage of the funnel, starting with pre-sales meetings booked.
How we define sales funnel stages
In order for you to make an accurate comparison of our average conversion rates to your own, it’s worth spending a moment to clarify how we define each stage of the sales funnel.
Meeting Booked and Meeting Attended should be self-explanatory. A meeting is booked when an account agrees on a time and date with one of our SDRs. It’s attended if they actually show up. You’d think the conversion rate would be higher, but never underestimate the busy schedules of executives.
SAL is a sales accepted lead.
The sales rep will report back to the SDR or marketer on the quality of the lead after the meeting. If they think the account has potential, it becomes a SAL.
An Opportunity can be quickly determined by a sales rep after the first couple of conversations with an account. If the account has a clear pain point that we can solve, they are marked as an opportunity and nurtured more carefully.
A Deal is also self-explanatory. When our reps successfully close an opportunity and sign the paperwork on the contract it becomes a deal.
Other outbound sales conversion rates
We’re not the only sales organisation to release conversion rate data.
PhoneWagon worked out it takes roughly 100 dials to make one sale. That’s a sales funnel conversion rate of 1%. They also have a 75% meeting-booked-to-meeting-attended conversion rate and a 33% close rate on those meetings.
SaaS company Reply has a lead-to-opportunity ratio of around 20%. Their opportunity to deal ratio comes in at around 25%.
Kalungi has done its own analysis of SaaS sales conversion rates. They found B2B startups have the following average sales conversion rates.
What’s the average outbound sales conversion rate?
Putting all of the above data together, we get the following conversion rate averages.
How can you improve your conversion rates?
Your outbound sales conversion rates will be determined in no small part by how good your initial prospecting is. Specifically, the quality of your SDRs and the types of tools you can equip them with will have a big say.
If you want to improve your outbound conversion rates, we recommend you start here. Improve the quality of the people you book meetings with, and the rest of your conversion rates will shoot up accordingly.
One strategy is to hire better SDRs, but that can be tricky. The best SDRs usually aren’t actively looking for a new role. Instead, it’s easier to improve the quality of meetings booked by your existing SDRs by giving them access to better tools and data.
Specifically, we recommend giving them access to an intelligent data platform. When SDRs can understand each lead’s propensity to buy and the nuance of their individual situations, it becomes much easier to 1) prioritise leads and 2) have meaningful conversations. As a result, more meetings will be booked with accounts that are more likely to buy. You don’t need us to tell you your sales executives will find those kinds of meetings much easier to close, too.
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