21 Stats Every Sales Leaders Should Know

Whether you’re a numbers person or not, here are 21 stats that every technology sales leader should know.

Sales Quotas & Win Rates

1. Only 60% of companies say that quotas are set as a collaborative effort between the CEO with input from senior management. (CFO Alliance)

2. 64% of sales organizations reported correct quota setting as the major challenge for their compensation program. (Alexander Group)

3. The average quota attainment is just 54%. Only 30% of firms have 75% or more of their salespeople hit their quotas. On average, about 57% of salespeople make quota. (CSO Insights)

4. Companies that “peanut butter spread” quotas across similar roles see 14% less quota attainment than those that assign quotas based on territory-specific opportunity. (Xactly)

Sales KPIs and Reporting

5. 2/3 of organizations that use dedicated sales analytics tools say they have improved the outcomes of sales activities and processes. (Ventana)

6. Only 6% of companies who use a spreadsheet or static reporting can give their sales teams access to daily or near real-time data. (Xactly)

7. Two of the sales metrics tracked most often are margin at 65% and profitability at 51%. Surprisingly, only 6% of companies track the cost of a sales call. (OMG)

8. 79% of sales teams currently use or are planning to use sales analytics technology. (Salesforce)

9. Human and machine-generated data is growing 10x faster than traditional business data, and machine data is increasing even more rapidly at 50x that growth rate. (insideBIGDATA)

Sales Training and Management

10. Companies with a formal coaching process see 91.2% of overall quota attainment, as compared to 84.7% quota attainment for companies without. (Hoopla)

11. 60% of sales reps say they’re more likely to leave their job if their manager is a poor coach. (Center for Sales Strategy)

12. 55% of salespeople making their living in sales don’t have the right skills to be successful. (Caliper Corp)

13. Reps spend only 34% of their time selling and only 22% of high-performing teams rate their training process as very good. (Salesforce)

14. On average, a new salesperson takes 12 months to achieve success. (Sales Management Association)

15. A dynamic coaching process improves win-rates by 28% and quota attainment by 10%. Yet, 47% of organizations do not have a formal coaching process. (CSO Insights)

16. The top 10% of all salespeople are 304% more effective at listening and asking questions than the bottom 10%. (OMG)

17. Companies with dynamic sales coaching programs achieve 28% higher win rates. (Brainshark)

AI and the Future of Sales

18. AI associated with CRM activities will boost global business revenue from the beginning of 2017 to the end of 2021 by $1.1 trillion. (IDC)

19. Sales teams who use Salesforce as their CRM tend to be twice as bullish about the impact of AI on sales than teams who don’t use Salesforce. (Cien)

20. 75% of Sales organizations are planning, evaluating or have implemented some version of AI into their sales process. (Sales Mastery)

21. 31% of sales leaders see AI as a source of added complexity – a significantly higher rate than sales reps. (Cien)

While everyone seems to be looking for more data, at Cien one of our most frequently heard complaints is “I have a lot of KPIs and do not know how to make sense of them”.

So perhaps sales professionals are not measuring the right things to really solve their sales performance problems. Perhaps they just need a single metric that explains a reps performance?

Put your data to work. Get stats on your team’s strengths and weaknesses for with Cien’s Hidden Revenue Assessment.