What are your cold outreach conversion rates? Top 3 Metrics And Benchmarks To Track
Top 3 metrics to track
My husband, Roman Hokhloff, started sales on a new project last month. He was able to get 8 clients in 3 weeks. Below is a screenshot of his sales funnel and conversion rates:
46,56% of replies received
12,68% scheduled meeting (sales qualified leads)
14,81% scheduled meeting-to-paid
He uses AI sales managers in messengers for cold outreach. The AI also communicates with the potential customer at all stages of the sales funnel. The critical conversion point in this funnel is the demo meeting (it, too, is automated).
Are these figures considered good or bad? Of course, the results depend highly on the product, cost, specificity, and even the tools and sales experience used. Nevertheless, you always want to compare yourself to others.
So, we have 3 main metrics to track and compare:
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Contact-to-Reply
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Reply-to-Conversion point
This point is marked by a specific action taken by the customer, signaling their interest in your product or service, such as a meeting appointment, form-filling, signing up for a trial, or installing an app. -
Lead-to-Customer
Conversion Rates Benchmarks
I searched the internet to find out which metrics companies typically share.
Contact-to-Reply
Most cold emails get a 1% to 5% reply rate. However, the standard for determining whether a cold contact is worthy of further pursuit should be about 30%. This might seem like a high bar, but if your prospects are of good quality, then you should be able to qualify approximately 1 of 3 of the people you reach out to.
If you cannot get an answer and start communicating at least 30%, you might need to consider obtaining better contacts, changing channels, or improving the content of your initial message.
Reply-to-Conversion point
Finding specific data on the conversion rate from replies in to sales-qualified leads (SQL) was challenging. However, the average number is 5% - 12.5%.
Lead-to-Customer
An acceptable conversion rate for most industries ranges between 2% and 5%, with some industries expecting an ideal rate of 10% or more.
For B2B SaaS products, especially those with an average price range of $1,000 to $2,000, the conversion rate from sales qualified lead-to-customer might generally be between 5% and 10%.
Additional metrics
Contact-to-Lead (SQL)
The average conversion rate across fourteen industries is 2.9%. View each industry
Contact-to-Customer
The conversion rate might even be lower than 1%, especially if the outreach is not highly targeted. However, for well-segmented markets where the outreach is personalized and the product strongly fits the needs of the contacted prospects, conversion rates could potentially reach or exceed 1.5%.
Hackers, let's gather your metrics and build really relevant averages that take into account the industry, average check, and the specifics of your sales funnel. Who's ready to share their data? 👇 💬
Sources:
This is very insightful and well-timed, thanks
Your Welcome 🤗
This is a valuable analysis. Particularly useful is the detailed breakdown of conversion rates at different stages of the sales funnel. Understanding these metrics can help others refine their outreach strategies. I look forward to more information like this!
thank you for the summary 🙌)
This is a great analysis! Curious about the AI sales manager. Are they customer build or a 3rd part tool?
we use the Chat GPT model and 1 genius developer with his genius stack :)
Impressive! Could you share which tools and platforms you use? It would be also good to know more about the industry you are targeting.
These insights could benefit others looking to optimize their own conversion strategies. Thanks for sharing these metrics, and I look forward to learning more about your approach!
Here's some information about tools that anyone can use for automation https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-we-built-an-ai-startup-while-trying-to-overcome-our-language-barriers-to-sell-globally-4ef499da8b
Thank you, Gene 🙏 Today I plan to publish a new post with step-by-step instructions on automation
It's a nice cold outreach rate. I'm curious about the process about finding right people to reach
We use databases such as Sales Navigator, Apollo AI, etc., and our own contact parsing systems.
Thanks for the details!
you're welcome ☺️
That reply rate alone is pretty impressive.
Yes!) I will show what messages we sent and in which channel today in another piece (I will attach screenshots of the correspondence)
It is great to see concrete numbers to compare to. Thank you for gathering them! These numbers are ratios but it could be also interesting to see the time aspect or the typical number of trials before drawing conclusions about the efficiency of the applied strategy.
1000 seems a large number for manual outreach. So, if 1000 is let's say the recommended, then automation has to be the corner stone for success. Especially, if several campaigns are required (with fine-tuning your marketing or communication strategy after each one). These numbers seem surprisingly large.
What is the typical time (or number of overall trials) starting from zero to achieve a relevant number of successful conversions? (success=achieve a baseline income you can survive)
Thank you! Yes, the numbers stunned even ourselves. You're absolutely right - automation is the key to success.
Today I plan to publish a material with step-by-step instructions on automation. For now, I'll answer your last question: the whole process from collecting the database to receiving payment for the sample on the screenshot took about 3 weeks. This is a very short sales cycle due to several factors:
Thank you for the further details!
so, here you can find out more 😊 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-we-built-an-ai-startup-while-trying-to-overcome-our-language-barriers-to-sell-globally-4ef499da8b
Thank you!