When you’re in sales, your job depends on initiating conversations with buyers to fill the front end of the pipeline. The problem? Buyers are busier than ever — it’s hard breaking through the noise to connect.
Through the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research, we talked to 488 B2B buyers, representing $4.2 billion in purchases across 25 industries. These buyers are sold to every day. Here’s what they told us influences their willingness to connect with a seller and ultimately make a purchase decision. We’ve distilled that survey into 27 sales prospecting stats you need to know.
Buyers are willing to meet but…
First, it’s important to know that buyers do accept meetings, but by and large they don’t find these meetings valuable. Buyers report to us that:
1. Eighty-two percent accept meetings.
2. Fifty-eight percent of their meetings do not deliver value.
Sometimes they want to hear from you.
If you make enough cold calls you might think nobody ever wants to talk, but buyers said there are situations when they want to talk with sellers. Here’s what they said:
3. When I’m looking for new ideas to improve business results (71 percent).
4. When I’m looking to solve a problem (62 percent).
5. When I’m evaluating providers (54 percent).
Bottom line: buyers want to hear from you early in the sales process.
How you make first contact matters.
We asked buyers about the outreach methods they prefer and which they’ve responded favorably to:
6. Email: 80 percent of buyers prefer to be contacted this way.
7. Fifty-eight percent of buyers…
