What's the best time of day to follow up? Is high call volume actually important? Is there an ideal sales cadence? How quickly should you respond to a new inbound lead? Is it critical to respond within 5 minutes? The Telfer School of Management, in partnership with VanillaSoft, recently undertook the largest ever academic study of sales data - examining 130,000,000 real-life sales interactions and 45,000,000 contacts. In this presentation, from the 2018 ZoomInfo Growth Acceleration Summit, we share these findings, and will have you questioning what contemporary thought leaders have been espousing as effective. If you want to better organize your sales process, multiply your conversion rates, and dramatically increase your revenues, you need to hear what this data is saying.

1. Slow Down, You’re Moving Too Fast
How the Right Sales Data Can Help Improve Your Sales Process

2. DAVID HOOD
CEO, VANILLASOFT
David Hood is a successful software entrepreneur with
extensive international experience in finance, business
development, sales, and marketing. Under his leadership
VanillaSoft has grown over the past decade from a small start-
up to a leader in the inside sales and CRM space focusing on
sales engagement and cadence automation.
david@vanillasoft.com

3. What can you LEARN from
studying 130,000,000 sales
interactions?

4. THE
STUDY
Big Data
Telfer School of Management,
Business Analytics Division, University of Ottawa
• 130,000,000 interactions retained from a total of 220,000,000
• 45,000,000 distinct contacts
• 4,000,000 Web leads
• 550 companies
• Over 40 countries, close to 5,000,000 data points from Europe
• Over 30 industries, 70% B2B and 30% B2C

5. Study Objectives
What are the most consistent and relevant variables
that are significant for a lead conversion model?
What are the relationships and patterns between
these variables, and how do they impact lead
conversion outcomes?

6. Study Approach
• Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM)
• Calculated central tendency measures of initially identified
variables to plot distributions and understand relationships
between them
• Correlation statistics and logistic regression used to verify
relationship between variables
• Preliminary results –the current study should wrap up by
end of year.

7. Areas of Focus
Seeking clear outcomes
Speed-to-Lead
How quickly do you respond to a warm lead?
Persistency
How often do you attempt to engage the lead?
Variables Affecting Positive Outcome
What influences a next step, or a sale versus a loss?

8. SPEED-TO-LEAD
Past studies have shown the
importance of responding
quickly to warm inbound leads

9. First Contact
Attempt
5.8%
7.1%
10.9%
12.3%
13.4% 13.5%
14.3%
13.4% 13.3%
13.9%
13.0% 12.8% 13.0%
6.3%
5.4%
First Contact Attempt: Responses Time To
Web Leads and Outcomes

10. Call Day
First Attempt
64.98
139.86
141.92 140.31 138.67
136.14
87.9
125.43
117.51
114.11 112.72 112.77 114.03
96.64
Call Day to Response Rate (Duration)
First Attempts

11. Call Time
First Attempt
135.64
145.99 146.36
148.24 147.05
139.04
136.85
132.11
125.77
114.55
100.24
91.64
87.63
123.72 122.31
124.93
126.79
123.65
119.08 118.92
116.04
111.23
103.17
91.64
84.24
76.89
Time of Call to Response Rate (Duration)
First Attempts

12. Call Back Times
7
16
22
14
8 8 8
6
4
2 2
2
1
3
12
14
9
7
9
7
7 6
8
9
6
2
Scheduled Call Back Times
B2B B2C

13. PERSISTENCY
Speed-to-lead is really about
the first touch. So, how
important are
follow-up attempts?

14. Average
Contact Trend
Average
Contact Trend
3.248
4.135
5.766
6.516
6.12
5.661
5.947 5.909 5.93
Average Contact Trend (Win Outcome)

15. Average
Contact

16. Average
Contact

17. Average
Contact

18. Call
Productivity
• No direct link is found between call productivity (number of
calls) and success.
• A strong correlation is found between call productivity and
follow-up, which strongly increases success.
• The best performers made between 50-60 calls a day.

19. Sales
Experience
• Experience was measured by the amount of time
working with the current company.
• Salespeople with more experience have a higher win
rate.
• Experiences salespeople engage with more persistence
and have higher average call durations.

20. Conclusion
How will your selling practices change?
Speed-to-Lead
Respond to new warm leads quickly – but not too quickly.
Conventional wisdom that immediate response is best may
cost you sales, and tardy responding definitely will.
Persistency
The number of contact attempts to reach a successful outcome
is trending upwards, and can vary significantly from industry to
industry. Persistency is one of the most important factors in
sales success.
Cadence
Sales cadence has an impact on the outcome. When and
how often you call will significantly affect your sales.
Experience
Even with technology, experience plays a roll. Experienced
salespeople make fewer calls on average but they engage with
more persistency, speed and are have longer average calls.

21. www.vanillasoft.com
@VanillaSoft