99 sales stats that will help you sell smarter.

Here are 99 sales stats that will make you sell smarter:

1. 44% of salespeople give up after one follow up. (Source: Scripted)
2. If you follow up a web lead within 5 minutes, you’re 9 times more likely to convert them. (Source: Insidesales.com)
3. 23% of salespeople find upselling to existing customers a daily challenge. (Source: sales-i)
4. Buyers are between 60 and 90% finished with the buying process before they engage with sales. (Source: Jon Miller)
5. Thursday is the best day to prospect. (Source: insidesales.com)
6. Tuesday is the worst. (Source: insidesales.com)
7. Inside sales departments are growing 300% faster than outside sales. (Source: Dave Elkington)
8. Top salespeople outperform average ones by 2:1 and low performers by 10:1. (Source: Salesforce.com)
9. Only 5% of B2B sales teams consider social media an effective lead gen tool. (Source: Ken Krogue)
10. However, 94% of prospects are active on social media. (Source: Ken Krogue)
11. 70% of all projects your prospects implement are unbudgeted. If they can see a need, they’ll find the money. (Source: Objection Handling 201)
12. Only a third of buyers trust brands. (Source: The ABCs of social selling)
13. 17% of salespeople believe manual data entry is a hindrance to their company’s bottom line. (Source: sales-i)
14. 92% of buyer’s trust recommendations. (Source: The ABCs of social selling)
15. The average company spends between $10,000 and $15,000 hiring a salesperson and only $2,000 on sales training. (Source: Effective Onboarding: The Foundation of Success)
16. Inside salespeople spend about a quarter of their time generating leads and doing research. (Source: Casual Coaching causes Crummy Commissions)
17. 74% of sales teams suffer from poor CRM adoption. (Source: Improving Sales in a Brave New World)
18. Only 13% of customers believe a salesperson can understand their requirements. (Source: Inside Sales to Overtake Field Sales: Are You Ready?)
19. 80% of sales require 5 follow up calls after the first meeting. (Source: Sirius Decisions)
20. The average salesperson gives up after just 2 follow up calls. (Source: Sirius Decisions)
21. 50% of sales go to the first salesperson to contact the prospect. (Source: Insidesales.com)
22. 44% of salespeople give up after 1 follow up call. (Source: Themarketingdonut.co.uk)
23. 10% of salespeople believe using Excel for sales reporting and analysis is damaging to their business. (Source: sales-i)
24. The average cost of a customer telephone call is $33.11. (Source: Salesforce.com)
25. The average cost of a customer field sales call is $276.48. (Source: Salesforce.com)
26. On average a company loses between 10 and 30% of its customers each year. (Source: Salesforce.com)
27. It’s 6 to 7 times cheaper to save an existing customer than to acquire a new one. (Source: Spoken.com)
28. Only 2% of cold calls result in an appointment. (Source: Leapjob.com)
29. 80% of sales calls with a referral lead to a meeting. (Source: IKO-system.com)
30. 6% of salespeople always go with their ‘gut’ feeling when making decisions. (Source: sales-i)
31. 91% of customers say they’d give a referral. (Source: Dale Carnegie)
32. But… only 11% of salespeople ask for one. (Source: Dale Carnegie)
33. At any given time, only 3% of your market is actively buying. 56% are not ready, 40% are poised to begin. (Source: Vorsight)
34. Companies that automate lead management see a 10% greater increase in revenue. (Source: Gartner)
35. Lead nurturing emails generate an 8% click through rate compared to general emails that generate 3%. (Source: HubSpot)
36. Nurtured leads cost 33% less than non-nurtured leads. (Source: Forrester)
37. Companies that nurture leads make 50% more sales. (Source: Forrester)
38. In a typical company with 100-500 employees, there are an average of 7 decision makers. (Source: Gartner)
39. Two thirds of B2B marketers identified engaging key decision makers as their top challenge. (Source: Forrester)
40. 35% of email recipients open email based on a subject line alone. (Source: Convince & Convert)
41. Email is 40 times more effective at getting new customers than social media. (Source: McKinsey)
42. 49% of salespeoples’ biggest daily challenge is understanding which customers are falling in sales. (Source: sales-i)
43. 92% of buyers say they delete emails from unknown senders. (Source: A Sales Guy)
44. Lost productivity and poorly managed leads cost companies at least $1 trillion every year. (Source: CMO Council)
45. 95% of buyers choose a solution provider that provided them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process. (Source: The Whole Brain Group)
46. 71% of salespeople say they spend too much time on data entry. (Source: Heinz Marketing)
47. 85% of prospects and customers are dissatisfied with their on-the-phone experience. (Source: Salesforce.com)
48. 93% of converted leads are contacted by the 6th call attempt. (Source: HubSpot)
49. The best time to cold call is 4pm – 5pm. The second best time is 8am – 10am. The worst times are 11am and 2pm. (Source: insidesales.com)
50. The last 5 minutes of a sales presentation are the most memorable, so end with a story – 63% of attendees remember stories. (Source: RedBase Interactive)
51. Emails with “Free” in the subject line were opened 10% more than those without. (Source: HubSpot)
52. Nearly six in 10 salespeople say that when they figure out what works for them, they don’t change it. (Source: HubSpot)
53. 40% of salespeople use technology to analyze data which informs their decisions. (Source: sales-i)
54. 13% of all full-time jobs in the United States are sales positions. (Source: SilledUp)
55. Over $1 trillion is spent annually on sales forces. (Source: Salesforce.com)
56. Companies with a playbook are 33% more likely to be high performers. (Source: Salesforce.com)
57. Yet 40% of sales teams don’t have one. (Source: Salesforce.com)
58. The average return on investment for CRM is $8.71 for every dollar spent. (Source: Nucleus Research)
59. Effective sales organizations are 81% more likely to be practicing consistent usage of a CRM or other system of record. (Source: Aberdeen Group)
60. 22% of salespeople still don’t know what a CRM is, and 40% still use informal methods like spreadsheets and email programs to store customer data. (Source: HubSpot)
61. A CRM system can help increase sales by up to 29%. (Source: Salesforce.com)
62. And sales productivity by up to 34%. (Source: Salesforce.com)
63. 24% more salespeople achieve annual sales quota with mobile access to their CRM. (Source: Aberdeen Group)
64. 47% of polled CRM users said that their CRM had a significant impact on customer retention. (Source: Capterra)
65. Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases. (Source: Marketo)
66. Only 5% of salespeople said leads they received from marketing were very high quality. (Source: HubSpot)
67. 82% of customers viewed five or more pieces of content from the winning vendor before making a purchase. (Source: Forrester)
68. 70% of purchasing decisions are made to solve a specific problem. (Source: Impact Communications)
69. Only 30% of buyers are looking for added value. (Source: Impact Communications)
70. Salespeople who use social selling are 79% more likely to hit their sales goals than those who don’t. (Source: Aberdeen Group)
71. Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. (Source: Annuitas)
72. You are 70% more likely to get an appointment on an unexpected sale if you join LinkedIn Groups. (Source: Vorsight)
73. A referred customer spends 13.2% more than a non-referred customer. (Source: Journal of Marketing)
74. Only 33% of inside sales rep time is spent actively selling. (Source: CSO Insights)
75. 17% of sales managers cite having visibility into what their sales team is doing as their biggest daily challenge. (Source: sales-i)
76. 50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting. (Source: The B2B Lead)
77. 46% of high-growth tech companies are growing via inside sales. (Source: Harvard Business review)
78. Nearly 57% of B2B prospects and customers feel that their sales teams are not prepared for the first meeting. (Source: IDC)
79. 88% of missed opportunities were caused because sales couldn’t find or leverage internal resources. (Source: Qvidian)
80. 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
81. Alignment of sales and marketing positively impacts revenue growth up to 3 times. (Source: Bulldog Solutions)
82. Salespeople ignore half of all of marketing leads. (Source: The B2B Lead)
83. The average voicemail response rate is 4.8%. (Source: insidesales.com)
84. 80% of calls go to voicemail, and 90% of first time voicemails are never returned. (Source: RingLead)
85. Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25-95%. (Source: Bain & Company)
86. The optimal voicemail message is between 8 and 14 seconds. (Source: The Sales Hunter)
87. 15% of a salesperson’s day is spent leaving voicemails. (Source: RingLead)
88. Over a quarter of salespeople say there is too much customer information stored across different systems. (Source: sales-i)
89. Subject lines with more than 3 words experience a drop in open rate by over 60%. (Source: ContactMonkey)
90. Relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than bulk emails. (Source: Jupiter Research)
91. 78% of decision makers polled have taken an appointment or attended an event that came from an email or cold call. (Source: DiscoverOrg)
92. 40% of buyers would have bought an item anyway, with or without a promotion. (Source: Inspector Insight)
93. A 1% pricing discount results in a decrease of 8% in operating profits for the average company. (Source: McKinsey)
94. 92% of all customer interactions happen on the phone. (Source: Salesforce.com)
95. The average salesperson makes 52 calls every day. (Source: The Bridge Group)
96. 42% of salespeople feel they don’t have enough information before making a call. (Source: Lattice Engine)
97. 68% of companies struggle with lead generation. (Source: SalesStaff)
98. 87% of workers are not actively engaged in their jobs. (Source: Gallup)
99. And finally, only 60% of salespeople meet their quota. (Source: CSO Insights)