Whether you’re blogging, have an email list, run a YouTube channel, focus on social media or rely on good old-fashioned outreach, generating leads is a daunting task.
You have to make sure you’re not only growing an audience for your company and product, but also that said audience will be interested in what you have to offer.
Unfortunately, all of that means nothing if you get your sales cycle wrong.
All of that hard work put into cultivating an audience and catching their interest is wasted if your sales cycle doesn’t get that audience to convert.
The reasons for this sales cycle failing are also frustratingly wide. You could be:
- Sending too many emails and pushing away leads
- Sending too few emails and letting them forget about you
- Pitching too many sales emails and making your leads feel undervalued
- Pitching too many marketing emails and never following up with a CTA
- Wasting time and money by spending too long with each lead
- Abandoning good leads before they’re fully convinced, and so on
My team was plagued with all of these worries, and so I decided to learn what to do from the best.
By signing up to over 280 SaaS companies (including the Montclare SaaS 250 and the top startups in AngelList), I was able to see the sales cycle of them all and gain some unique insights.
Before you ask, yes, I used the same data for every signup (details of a fake Virgin employee) and took the same approach to all – I didn’t interact with them beyond sending the initial email.
From how often they followed up to how many left voicemails and even what the most popular marketing automation software was, I recorded all of it on a dedicated website. If you want to see the finer details of the study then check out Inside SaaS Sales, but I’ll show you the highlights here today.
Let’s get started.
Stay in contact for 9 days
One of the core principles that interested us was how long the sales cycle should be (how long you should stay in contact if there’s no reply). The key here is striking a balance between wasting resources on an uninterested or dead lead versus not spending long enough to convert possible customers.
After assessing the 2,000+ data points (email and voicemail activity) from every company, it turns out that the sweet spot for following up with leads is nine days. This gives long enough to truly rule out the lead f it’s bad, but lets you cut your losses to avoid losing too much money.
Now, this point does come with a caveat; the amount of time is different depending on what makes up your sales cycle.
For companies that used only emails in their sales cycle (such as PersistIQ), the average was a much shorter 5 days before radio silence was given.
For those that included voicemails in their sales cycle (such as Base), the average length was 23 days.
Essentially, if you think that a lead has enough potential to warrant calling and leaving a voicemail, you should stay in contact with them for much longer in order to make sure that time wasn’t wasted.
Send one email every day
After finding the average sales cycle length, the next vital point was determining how often emails should be sent. After all, you want to promote as much as possible to your leads and remind them that you’re there without drowning them in so many emails that they relegate you to the spam folder.
Judging by the top 280 SaaS companies, you should be aiming to send one email every day. However, again, there are a few provisions to that rule.
First, the majority of companies (such as Front) sent roughly one sales email every two days, with marketing emails in between. This strikes a nice balance between keeping your audience’s interest with topics relevant to them (marketing) and selling them on whatever your product is without being too pushy.
Second, many of the 280 don’t send one email every day of their cycle. Many (such as Sprintly) communicated far more during the first half of their sales cycle, then slowed down towards the end.
This is a useful technique which capitalises on the momentum of the initial sign up, but backs off quickly to avoid annoying the user with emails and voicemails.
So, if a lead’s worth leaving a voicemail then they’re worth talking to for longer, and although you can send one email a day by all means, it can pay off to send more emails around the initial sign up, and to not focus too much on dry sales pitches.
Don’t leave voicemails as standard
Voicemails are a fantastic way to show a potential customer that you care about what they have to say, and they they’re being treated as an individual. Unfortunately, they also require a much greater resource investment from your sales team to carry out.
It’s a high-touch method which can really boost your chances of converting your lead, but failing to do so means that you’ve wasted yet more time and money into a dead end. Thus you need to balance the potential gain of carrying them out against the resources they require.
So, it should come as no surprise that a whopping 75% of the companies I signed up to didn’t leave any voicemails.
While this may have changed if I’d replied to any of their communication (an active lead is more valuable than a silent one), it’s obvious that at a base level it just isn’t worthwhile to make a habit of leaving voicemails with every potential customer.
However, when combined with the point from earlier about companies sales cycles being 160% longer if a voicemail is left, you can quickly see the bigger picture.
Whether companies like Radius and OrderDynamics reach out with voicemails to all of their leads or they just judged that I was worthwhile enough to put in the extra time and effort, voicemails are far from something that should be done for everyone.
Instead, take stock of the resources you have and what the potential lead is worth, and only bother with leaving a voicemail if you’re willing to keep trying for far longer than usual.
Use marketing automation
Ah, marketing automation. The easiest way by far to save time and money while running your sales cycle.
By automatically sending marketing emails to your leads you free up time better spent on tasks such as leaving voicemails or closing in-progress leads. Although it takes a little time to set up your campaigns and make sure that everything is running smoothly, the savings in the long-term are truly incredible.
That’s not even mentioning how useful it is to have a sales cycle that’s free from human error!
Backing up my statements, a massive 53% of all emails I received were from automated marketing campaigns. In other words, with a bit of tinkering you can double the content in your sales cycle without having to do any extra work.
Going even further, 67% of companies used at least partial automation, and 39% had only automated emails. That means almost 40% of the top 280 SaaS companies save their time by letting services like Mailchimp automatically send their emails for them.
In conclusion, it pays to analyse your competition
Despite everything I’ve said here, I’m willing to admit that nothing is set in stone. All of these rules can (and potentially should) be broken depending on what your company is, how it markets itself, and what lead you’re dealing with.
However, mocking up a sales cycle on nothing but intuition means that you’re ignoring the hard work (and mistakes) that the current success stories have already done for you.
Take advantage of that, and learn from what they’re doing. Don’t necessarily copy them verbatim, but learn their techniques and think about why it works for them, then apply those lessons to your own efforts (as I did with Inside SaaS).
Best of luck with your sales cycle, and here’s to maintaining a healthy conversion rate!
Guest Blog by Benjamin Brandall, content marketer at Process Street
Benjamin is a content marketer at Process Street, where he writes on startups, SaaS, and workflows. His work has appeared on TechCrunch, The Next Web, and Fast Company.
