Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2018; the cold-call figures it cites run to 2017.
Over the years, we’ve been gathering statistics on many aspects of the sales world, starting from the psychology of selling. What follows are percentages and averages that vary from one industry to another, so these aren’t universal rules, but they are premises worth bearing in mind.
What do audiences or customers remember after a presentation?
- After a presentation, 65% of attendees remember only the stories you told. Just 5% remember the statistics you presented.
That’s why storytelling matters so much: you really sell with stories, not with data. Steve Jobs used to say that people who use PowerPoint in a talk do so because they don’t have much of interest to say. Obviously, that shouldn’t be taken literally.
But it’s true that storytelling has become a very popular technique in TED talks and graduation speeches. In fact, the famous speech by the legendary Steve Jobs began: “Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.”
Customer objections
- Customers who end up buying raise 58% more objections than customers who don’t buy.
This is easy to explain. When there is genuine interest in buying, interest and doubts arise as a natural human mechanism.
Most salespeople fear objections and associate them with a lack of interest, when they are precisely the opposite. Objections give you an excellent opportunity to close the sale if you know how to answer them properly. Objections are often an unconscious test set by the buyer’s brain. If you pass the test, the sale happens.
See also: Brian Tracy’s 22 commandments for being a good salesperson
How many calls does it take to reach a prospect?
- In 2007 it took an average of 3.70 cold-call attempts to reach a prospect. By 2012 it took an average of 8 attempts. In 2017 it took an average of 11 cold calls.
In short, you have to learn to thrive under pressure. Things keep getting harder for salespeople, so they need more and more consistency, persistence and resilience in the face of difficulty. These are qualities that are increasingly hard to find in people working in sales.
See also: A salesperson’s PER: why you need to know your visits-to-sales ratio
The best day and time to prospect
- Thursday is the best day to prospect anywhere in the world. Wednesday is the second best. Tuesday is the worst.
We could look for explanations based on hundreds of factors, and some of them might be right and others wrong. These are simply what the statistics say for thousands of salespeople spread across hundreds of companies when we take their call, visit and sales records.
- The best time to make a cold call is between 9 and 10 in the morning and between 5 and 7 in the afternoon. The worst times are between 11 and 12 noon and between 8 and 10 at night. At least in Spain.
Follow-up calls
- 80% of sales require 4 follow-up calls after a meeting. 40% of salespeople give up after the first follow-up. 70% give up after the second.
Why do customers buy?
- 70% of people make a purchase decision to solve a problem. 30% make a purchase decision to gain something.
But in a way, forget those figures and remember this one instead:
- The number one reason a customer buys from you or signs up for your service isn’t the service, its quality or the price. It’s the trust they have in you.
In fact, the world’s best car salesman was clear about this: “Charge a fair price and get the customer to like you. That’s the formula for selling.”
Losing customers
- Every year, on average, you lose 15% of your customers for a variety of reasons.
These reasons can range from failing to motivate them to stay with your company to the competition simply doing a better job of customer acquisition and sales strategy. It’s a constant battle, and you can never let your guard down.
In fact, most companies put more effort into winning customers than into keeping them. That’s a big mistake, because a current customer is far more valuable than 5 potential ones. Your customer already trusted you, you’ve already spent resources winning them over, and they already know your product or service. Just give them a reason to stay with you.
But the truth is that it’s inevitable that a percentage of customers will leave us, for whatever reason, so you always have to be bringing in new ones. We know that when the number of customers stagnates or falls, it’s a sign the company is heading in the wrong direction and needs to change course.
Every year a company should increase its number of customers by at least 20%, and if it loses more than 25% of its customers in a year… let’s just say that’s the iceberg coming into view, and it needs to change course quickly.
Further reading
Featured image: Nenad Stojković, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
