Sales Cycle Trends Revealed in New Research, With Tips for C-Level Executives to Revive Revenue Loss

SILICON SLOPES, UT--(Marketwired - May 4, 2016) - InsideSales.com, the leading cloud-based sales acceleration technology company, today released new temporal data from its inaugural Business Growth Index, a comprehensive research report with a pulse on sales confidence, priorities and the impact of technology on a company's bottom line. This new set of data offers unique insights, revealing the best times of the week, month and quarter that C-suite executives can leverage to maximize their sales team's potential to successfully close deals and meet their quotas. 

With many companies reporting weak or disappointing earnings last quarter, executives at companies of all sizes are refining strategy to recover from Q1 losses. According to new data, Q1 is the slowest quarter for sales, so company executives still have time to reevaluate business trajectory and sales strategy in order to finish strong the rest of the year.

Insights from this new temporal data include:

• Weekend Sales Slump: Monday through Thursday are the best days to close, with 61 percent success overall. Friday deals closed drop to 53 percent and Saturday and Sunday tank to just over 30 percent wins.
• Not-So-Black Friday: Most deals are lost on Fridays, with over 2x the amount of money in play being lost in deals than on Monday through Thursday.
• Hump Day Peak: Wednesdays have the most deals closed, closely followed by Tuesday.
• Lucky Number 9: The 9th day of each month has the highest win rate with 69 percent. The 31st, however, drops to a low 30 percent.
• End of Month Drop: Although the most deals are closed on the last two days of the month, the 30th and 31st have an inverse win rate compared to the first through 29th. Sixty-seven percent of deals that close at the end of the month are lost, whereas 65 percent that are closed during the rest of the month are won. 
  
  

InsideSales has developed a few best practices for sales teams across any industry to optimize their strategy and achieving (or exceeding) Q2 revenue goals:

• Data Helps You Sell Faster, Smarter, More:
  • Data has become a strategic tool for every area of business, and your sales strategy shouldn't be an exception. Savvy executives encourage their sales organization to use data to identify who to market to and what will pique that contact's interest. Sales leadership also needs to know their team's success rate at closing/winning deals--for example, if their rushed attempts to win deals at the end of each month are not succeeding, then it's time for them to change their approach.
  • Predictive solutions can identify which deals have a higher probability of closing, and can be used to help focus a rep's attention on what's really going to close, as well as steps to take to improve or accelerate their odds.
•  Always Be Closing (It's not just a line from a movie, it's the real deal):
  • Closing deals every day is vital to your team's success. Why? Statistically, sales teams have MORE wins earlier in the month than at the end. If you've waited until the end of the month to amp up your game, you're cheating your company. Design reasons for customers to close earlier in the month, don't let stuff stack up at the end.
  • Also, don't forget to focus on leadership. Changing your closing cadence from monthly or quarterly to daily is a leadership opportunity.
• Incentives Work:
  • Get creative with the incentives you provide to your sales team. Choose one day a month to double their commission, or crown a "King" or "Queen" for the day based on deals won. Offer the top salesperson of the month a one-on-one lunch with yourself or another C-suite executive. Recognition can help fuel friendly competition among your sales organization and motivate them to sell and win more. As you do with your sales strategy overall, be sure to spread out rewards at a steady cadence throughout a financial period, or you may see fruitless increases in activity that lead to more losses than wins.
    
    

The temporal data and tips from InsideSales can be accessed here, and the full Business Growth Index is available at www.insidesales.com/research/BGi.

Methodology

The study's findings were based on a variety of sources, including quantitative analysis, a survey which collected answers from over 600 respondents between the January 23, 2016 and February 12, 2016, and system data that included over 5.4 million transactions from approximately 5,671 sales representatives over the course of 2015. The analysis was expanded to consider certain firmographic and geographic traits of the companies involved in order to observe patterns. Graphics generated from survey data use the mean as a measure of center. Those generated from system data use the median due to outliers present in that data.

About InsideSales.com

InsideSales.com offers the industry's leading sales acceleration platform built on Neuralytics, a predictive and prescriptive self-learning engine that drives revenue growth by delivering an optimized experience for both salesperson and buyer. The platform fuels sales rep performance and provides buyer personalization with breakthrough innovations in predictive sales communications, engagement tracking, forecasting, and rep motivation. InsideSales.com has received numerous accolades for its technology and has been named as one of the fastest growing companies by Inc. InsideSales.com enterprise customers include ADP, Microsoft, and Groupon.