B2B Sales Benchmarks. Compare Yourself to your Peers & Discover the Best Tactics and Channels that Drive Revenue

B2B Sales Benchmarks Compare Yourself to your Peers & Discover the Best Tactics and Channels that Drive Revenue

1

B2B Sales Benchmarks

13% of leads convert to opportunities, which takes on average 84 days. 6% of opportunities convert to deals which takes an additional 18 days.

Implisit analyzed the pipelines of hundreds of companies to discover the channels that deliver the highest conversion rate, to help you benchmarks your sales performance against your peers. The analysis shows that the best channel is employee and customer referrals. On average it takes 84 days to convert a lead to an opportunity and 18 days to convert an opportunity to a deal. How is your Sales team doing, as compared to your peers? Is your marketing team focusing on the right channels? Are you closing enough deals, or leaving money on the table? To answer all of these questions Implisit analyzed anonymous aggregated data from hundreds of companies to find out which channels deliver the highest conversion rate. Overall, results show that 13% of leads convert to opportunities across channels and that it takes about 84 days to convert a lead to an opportunity. Further down the sales funnel, only 6% of opportunities convert to from opportunity to deal, with average time-to-conversion of 18 days. Overall lead to deal conversion rate is 0.8%, which means that it takes over 128 leads to close one deal.

13% Lead to

84 days

6% Opportunity

18 days

opportunity

B2B Sales Funnel It takes an average of 84 days to convert 13% of leads into opportunities. Then, the decision process is much faster: it takes 18 days to convert an opportunity to a deal, but only 6% of opportunities end up closing.

to deal

Average time to conversion

Average time to conversion

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B2B Sales Benchmarks

Customer and employee referrals is the best performing channel with 3.63% conversion rate, followed by company websites with 1.55% conversion rate

Referrals work best When analyzing conversion rate by channel, one channel emerges as a clear winner. Customer and employee referrals generate 3.63% conversion rate, almost double than the next channel—websites with 1.55% conversion rate. Social has 1.47% conversion rate and paid search 0.99%. The worst performing channels are lead lists with 0.02% conversion rate, events with 0.04% conversion rate and email campaigns with 0.07% conversion rate.

Invest in employee & customer referrals, your website and social media

3.63%

Invest in your employee and customer referral programs referrals get the highest conversion rate – 3.6%. Leads from the company website and social channels get around 1.5% conversion rate. The worst performing channels are lead lists, company events and email campaigns.

1.47% Lead-to-Deal Conversion Rate

0.78%

Average

0.34% 0.02%

0.04%

0.07%

Lead list

Events

Email Campaign

LinkedIn

0.44%

Webinar

0.48%

0.94%

0.99%

1.55%

1.07%

0.55%

Partner Tradeshows Markeitng & Sales Paid Search Advertising generated

Other

Facebook / Website Customer & Twitter / Employee Other Social Referrals

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B2B Sales Benchmarks

Another interesting finding is that leads from channels with high conversion rate typically also become customers faster. Employee and customer referrals take 97 days to close, on average. Website leads take 76 days and social leads 42 days. The worst performing channels, lead lists and email campaigns, take the longest to close—over 160 days, on average.

Leads with best deal rate - close fast Social, website and employee referral have the above average conversion rate and have the shortest time to close. Lead lists, email campaigns, tradeshows and webinars have below average conversion rate and take more time to close.

WORST LEAD SOURCES Lead list

160

Email Campaign Tradeshows

140

Sales generated Other

120

Webinar

Customer & Employee Referral

Average

Paid Search

100 80

Website

Events Marketing & Advertising

60

20 0

Facebook / Twitter / Other Social

Partner

40

BEST LEAD SOURCES Average

Average Time from Lead to Deal (Days)

180

0.0%

0.5%

1.0%

1.5%

2.0%

2.5%

3.0%

3.5%

Lead-to-Deal Conversion Rate

Webinars create opportunities, but fewer deals When we separated the funnel into opportunities and deals, we found that some channels create more opportunities but these opportunities fail to convert to deals. For example, webinars have 17.8% conversion rate from lead to opportunity, but only 2.5% conversion rate from opportunity to deal. On the other hand, only 0.9% of leads from email campaigns convert to opportunities; however, 7.8% of these opportunities convert to deals—well above average.

4.0%

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B2B Sales Benchmarks

Company events have the lowest ratio of closed-won opportunities.

Opportunities in the CRM have typically been pre-qualified by sales reps. Therefore, we were surprised to find significant variation in the share of closed-won versus closed lost opportunities. Implisit’s analysis shows that this ratio may vary from 7.6% to 68.7%. In fact, company events, which may seem lots of fun, have the lowest ratio of closed won opportunities – 7.6%, followed by lead lists with 15.5%.

Webinars convert to opportunities, but don’t close Some channels are easier to convert to opportunities, but it does not mean that they generate more revenue. 18% of webinars attendees are converted to opportunities, but only 2.5% of those close. 31% of website inquiries are converted to opportunities but only 5% of these close.

Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate

31.3%

Opportunity-to-Deal Conversion Rate

5.0%

Website

24.7%

Customer & Employee Referral

17.8% 17.2% 15.3% 14.3% 13.9% 13.9% 12.4% 10.0%

Webinar

14.7% 2.5% 8.5%

Facebook / Twitter / Other Social

5.1%

Markeitng & Advertising

6.9% 7.7% 6.8%

Paid Search Other Sales generated

4.4% 4.9% 5.3%

Tradeshows Partner

6.5% 4.2% 2.5% 0.9% Average

LinkedIn Events Lead list

1.0% 0.9% 7.8%

Email Campaign Average

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B2B Sales Benchmarks

Conclusion Overall, it seems that lead source has a major impact on conversion rate. There are two things that sales and marketing organizations can do in order to act on these insights. First, they should strive to get more leads from the best performing channels, an second, they should put their closers on leads from the best preforming channels in order to maximize conversion rate. The 0.8% conversion rate from lead to deal shows the grinding work that reps have to do on a daily basis in order to meet their organization’s revenue target. However, it looks like even the best sales reps can do better with leads from the best channels.

About Implisit Implisit updates your prospect and customer communications to the appropriate CRM record, letting you manage your pipeline more effectively while saving you and your team valuable time on tedious tasks. The result is better pipeline management and more accurate forecasts.

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