Comment les meilleures équipes commerciales améliorent la vitesse de leur cycle de vente ? Par Outreach.

How Top Sales Organizations Improve Sales Velocity | 1
How Top Sales Organizations
Improve Sales Velocity
L E A D E R S H I P G U I D E

New Data About the Typical
Sales Cycle
Many sales leaders lament that they don’t know how to set the best
targets for their teams or how they compare with their peers.
And now more than ever, unpredictable macroeconomic
circumstances have created a lack of clarity around what successful
benchmarks look like.
Unpredictable
macroeconomic
circumstances
have created a
lack of clarity
around what
successful
benchmarks
look like.
Sales Cycle
Expectations
Top of Funnel
Calls, Emails,
& Meetings
Opp
Creation
Meeting
Hold Rate
Close
Rates

In the first Outreach Sales Productivity
Index, we aimed to solve this challenge
by exploring how modern sales
organizations perform throughout
the sales funnel. We surveyed more
than 250 organizations, measuring
how their sales professionals perform
against their process and pipeline
metrics. We then compared those
responses with sales leaders’
expectations for specific activities.
We found that a team’s ability to meet expectations in a typical
sales cycle waxes and wanes throughout the sales funnel. Leaders
continue to raise targets for top-of-the-funnel activities and
metrics despite growing evidence that teams aren’t meeting those
activity goals. On the other hand, close rates surprisingly meet the
expectations of sales leadership, despite missed numbers earlier in
the cycle.
This led us to question: Should sales leaders set more aggressive
goals on bottom-of-funnel conversion and win rates rather
than always beating the “you need more pipeline” drum with
unachievable top-of-funnel targets?
Close rates surprisingly meet
the expectations of sales
leadership, despite missed
numbers earlier in the cycle.

Top-of-Funnel Activities
Top-heavy expectations can’t compete
with reality
Sales leaders’ expectations and their teams’ performance is most out
of alignment at the top of the funnel.
Across all selling segments, the average gap in leader expectations
to sales actuals was approximately 30 percent.
Top-of-funnel activities, such as calls, emails, and meetings
scheduled, missed the expectations of sales leaders. Calls
represent the largest gap between expectations and actuals; the
gap is nearly 30 percent. If your sales cycle or geography puts
a heavy emphasis on calls, then closing this gap represents a
significant upside opportunity. Sales Cycle
Expectations
Top of Funnel
Calls, Emails,
& Meetings
Opp
Creation
Meeting
Hold Rate
Close
Rates
Sales activity volume reaches
a point of diminishing returns if
teams overemphasize quantity.

Increasing top-of-funnel efficacy is a proven way to improve bottom-
of-funnel outcomes — but activity volume can reach a point of
diminishing returns if teams overemphasize quantity over quality.
And during the COVID-19 pandemic, the ability to earn buyer
attention has gotten even more challenging.
Increasing
top-of-funnel
efficacy is a
proven way
to improve
bottom-
of-funnel
outcomes.

Sales Meetings
Bookings are low but hold rates are high
Another major gap we found at the top of the funnel is that sales
leaders expect reps to book at least 50 percent more meetings than
they actually do.
On average, teams are only booking meetings at 62 percent of
their leaders’ expectations. And COVID-19 seems to be widening
the gap between meeting expectations and meeting bookings.
Further analysis is required to determine if this gap is caused by
poor connect rates, irrelevant sales content, or poor discovery and
problem identification during early engagement.
Sales Cycle
Expectations
Top of Funnel
Calls, Emails,
& Meetings
Opp
Creation
Meeting
Hold Rate
Close
Rates
Sales leaders expect reps to book at least
50 percent more meetings than they
actually do.

When reps do book meetings, however, buyers are showing up.
Meeting hold rates are consistent with leader expectations. This
means the buyer found early interactions valuable enough to learn
more about an organization’s solution.
When reps
do book
meetings...
buyers
show up.

Opportunities
Converting meetings to opportunities
remains a challenge
Another area for improvement for sales teams is turning
meetings into opportunities. Sales teams are missing conversion
expectations by more than 37 percent (7 deals compared to 11
expected per month).
Respondents shared many reasons for these missed expectations
— the most common being “inconsistent workflow between team
members.” Leaders struggle to scale best practices and effective
sales techniques to all sellers.
Sales Cycle
Expectations
Top of Funnel
Calls, Emails,
& Meetings
Opp
Creation
Meeting
Hold Rate
Close
Rates
Sales teams
miss conversion
expectations by
more than
37 percent.

Good discovery and problem identification result in the excellent
meeting hold rates noted earlier; this presents an opportunity for
field enablement teams to widen the middle of the funnel and drive
higher meeting to opportunity conversion rates.
The second-highest reported reason for low conversion at this stage
was “too much time being spent on non-selling activities.” Sales
leaders can immediately improve this shortfall if they provide proper
guidance on time management and prioritization to their sellers.
Good
discovery
and problem
identification
result in
excellent
meeting
hold rates.

Sales teams hit numbers where it matters
most — winning new business.
Close Rates
There’s a bright spot at the bottom of
the funnel
The silver lining in all the data? Once deals are in the pipeline, they
are achieving close-to-expected win rates. That means most sales
teams are hitting their numbers where it matters most — winning
new business.
Sales Cycle
Expectations
Top of Funnel
Calls, Emails,
& Meetings
Opp
Creation
Meeting
Hold Rate
Close
Rates

On average, since March, teams reported closing their pipeline at
an average of 33 percent compared to pre-COVID expectations of 39
percent. This stands to reason that improvements in earlier stages
of the sales process may lead to greater returns toward the end of
the sale. For example, improving the number of meetings held and
opportunities converted from meetings will create more impact than
sending more cold emails.
The challenge many organizations face is a lack of visibility into
which activities, processes, content, and behaviors led to higher
conversion rates.
Improvements
in earlier
stages of the
sales process
may lead
to greater
returns
toward the end
of the sale.

Find Out How Your Team
Stacks Up
Sales leaders have plenty of opportunities to improve their sales
performance. Today, most sales processes look like a funnel, with
higher targets at the top and lower expectations at the bottom. But
based on data from the Outreach Sales Productivity Index, it may
make more sense to turn those funnels into pipes by increasing team
efficacy at every stage.
Sales leaders have plenty of opportunities to
improve their sales performance.
To truly modernize selling strategies, leaders need visibility
and insights into their sales operations to set up standardized,
consistent, repeatable, and scalable processes throughout the sales
cycle — no matter what shape it represents.

A sales engagement platform can help companies do all this and more.
Schedule a demo with Outreach experts to learn how you can improve
rep performance and succeed as a modern
sales organization.

Comment les meilleures équipes commerciales améliorent la vitesse de leur cycle de vente ? Par Outreach.

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Comment les meilleures équipes commerciales améliorent la vitesse de leur cycle de vente ? Par Outreach.