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.
