Technology has taken an enormous leap forward in the past year. Advances in cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) that were expected to arrive in a decade emerged in one year. Embracing innovative tech is what will distinguish the leaders in sales from the rest of the pack. 

Remote work is now a necessity. Sales teams that haven’t embraced remote-enabled technology are scrambling and have had to lean on systems that are largely untested on a wide scale. But buyers now work remotely too. In-person meetings and office visits haven’t been possible, and sellers have had to complete the entire sales cycle virtually.

As we emerge from a year of unanticipated and unprecedented change and technological growth, here’s how sales teams have adapted and transformed to meet the digital needs of the new sales landscape.

CRMs are the Backbone of Sales Organizations

In our recent State of Sales Development study, we drew from polling data from over 450 top sales dev leaders to evaluate their teams and technology. When asked about their top technical tools, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools rose to the top. Compared with past studies, there’s a clear shift toward embracing CRM as the system of record, putting it in its proper place.

In 2017, we predicted that CRM adoption would increase by 38%, but in 2020, all respondents used a CRM. Since the implementation of CRMs is so widespread, it might feel like a no-brainer that this is a top tool for sales teams. CRMs have become the preferred source of truth for reporting, marketing, and measuring sales teams’ productivity, even while data reliability in CRM remains sketchy.

Still, without the robust capabilities of CRMs, modern sales teams are left in the dark about contacts and opportunities. Particularly in 2020, sales teams who went remote leaned heavily on their CRM to provide real-time data for reps and sales leaders, no matter where they were. 

Additionally, CRM has to be continuously updated and populated with records and activities. When reps are relied on to do this, other priorities get in the way and basic human error leads to misinformation or a lack of information in the CRM. There is a common behavior of looking to CRM as a source of truth, but it’s only as accurate as you make it. Inconsistent adoption will lead to gaps in information. That’s why a tool that can automatically update your CRM with a real-time bi-directional sync is so powerful.

Combined with other integrations, like social prospecting and email engagement, up to date CRMs can give key information about customers that reps can then use to adjust their messaging and cadence.

If CRM is to truly be the foundation of a sales organization’s tech stack, on which every other tech innovation builds, there needs to be deliberate effort applied to promoting its adoption and ensuring adherence to processes to produce accurate data insights.

Ramping Up Sales Engagement Solutions

In 2017-2018, our research showed that utilizing sales cadence was associated with the greatest attainment (78%) compared to other sales tech. With better technology, these tools grew in 2020, and prioritization and targeting tools reported the highest attainment (80%). Many of these tools (sales cadence, targeting, prioritzation, etc) have been consolidated into a single platform—like sales engagement.

Sales teams are increasingly relying on technology to tell them more about how and when to contact a lead. Reps can focus on the fundamentals of sales and better understand their contacts and their specific pain points. Sales cadence, prioritization, and targeting tools simply narrow the pool of leads to create maximum impact for your teams.

Consolidating Tech Stacks

Reporting and SMS technologies lead out in the tech attainment space. However, as sales engagement technology continues to grow, the tech stacks for teams have become fractured, and reps spend time switching windows to access different tools and reports.

According to task management platform Asana, on average workers use 10 apps 25 times per day to complete their work. In the US, this number is higher, employees manage 13 tools an average of 30 times per day. Every time a rep switches an app, they lose productivity and are more likely to struggle to prioritize tasks and objectives.

Many organizations have recognized this problem, and the priority for bringing on new technology is integration. An all-encompassing platform allows workers to stay in one tool and access all the technology and reporting they need to complete their work. The number of tools available to sales teams is vast, but sales leaders are thinking smarter about which tools they bring on and the value that they add to their existing stack.

Digital enhancements to traditional sales tools have enabled remote teams to complete work that wouldn’t have been possible even a decade ago. Teams that embraced and accelerated their adoption of these tools had a solid foundation to add even more capabilities and efficiencies to their teams. Sales leaders looking forward to 2021 should continue to prioritize tools that add value to their teams rather than just distract.

Playbooks by XANT includes reporting, SMS, video engagement, prioritization, and the top tech tools that sales teams need to be successful in 2021. And, all of this is achieved without moving out of a CRM, creating one go-to tool for your entire team to stay on track. Schedule a demo here. 

Data Set

Playbooks is the leading enterprise sales engagement platform that guides sellers through their engagement with buyers, in part by brokering calls, sending emails, and otherwise automating a large number of sales activities. The platform anonymizes collective data on activities and outcomes and employs AI to produce insights into the behaviors of buyers, or Buyer Intelligence. 

For this study, we pulled a sample from our collective data of approximately 30 million outbound calls, collected over 2.5 years (2018-2020), and generated by over 10 thousand users in North America. The sample contains 30% success defined by a reps’ disposition indicating ‘correct contact’, and 70% contact failures. Calls occurred in all major time zones.

What Does the Data Say About When To Prospect?

The findings are striking in their simplicity and application for sales practice. Whereas the bulk of prospecting calls are made in the afternoon hours (3X higher), calling in the mornings through noontime prospect local time yields an abnormal contact rate of 15% higher in the AM vs. PM. For perspective, for every 100 calls made, at a baseline contact rate of 30%,  sales orgs would achieve a boost of about 5 conversations. And to achieve this benefit sales reps need to overload their morning hours with calling activity while pushing other items (demos, meetings, admin) to the afternoons.

Graph 1: Variation from average, or baseline, connection rates by day and time block

Graph 2: Prospecting attempts volume by hourly blocks; highest performing time blocks in yellow, but they’re near the lowest in attempts made

Additional Insights for Effective Outbound Prospecting

Sales leaders would do well to understand the following benefits from aligning the timing of their revenue team’s outbound prospecting practice.

1. Early week contact rates are superior on Monday and Tuesday AM times
2. Afternoon times are subpar on most days with Friday PM as the worst time
3. Lunch hour on most days performs more like AM than PM times 
4. Late day times are better than early to mid-afternoons

Overall, prospecting is more efficient when overloaded in the morning or late afternoon hours. These empirical findings comply with most sales leaders’ intuition, though with higher specificity. When combining these findings with sales automation technology like XANT Playbooks, the best time to call can be programmed to an individual prospect which may vary from the overall effect observed in the data.

Seasonal Trend

Beyond the best time to call, the data also shows seasonal variation by the week of the year which can be useful for sales planning. These findings may be categorized as follows:

• Year-end boost. Prospects are prone to engage with sellers in winter months, with spikes during the last week in December and the first week in February. 
• New Year’s zeal. Prospects generally answer at the highest annual rate during January and February.
• Summer doldrums. June and July see the lowest averages in buyer connection rates.

Graph 3: Variation in connection rates against the baseline, or average, by month

These findings mirror deal closure patterns that outperform end of year, but they also suggest that making contact at opportune times during the year may lead to unexpectedly short deal cycles.

Performance Variation

As a cautionary note for revenue organizations which rely on prospecting to meet a quota, the data show that contact rates are declining, though not unexpectedly. Whereas Reps once could make contact at even 40%, baseline contact rates are converging toward the lower thirties. However, for all the effort we observe that average talk time has doubled in the same period. One potential take away and upside for reps willing to persist is that prospects are still willing to talk, even if they are more elusive to initially contact.

The “Time Management in Sales” research by XANT Labs included a survey of over 200 sales reps and over a dozen in-depth interviews to determine how reps spend their time and how they perceive the usefulness of their day-to-day tools.

I was taken aback by the results of our latest research, I encourage you to give it a read.

What do Sales Reps do With Their Time?

There are twelve main tasks sales reps do during a typical week. Oddly, revenue generating activities only make up 36.6% percent of reps’ activities. Over half (63.4%) of their time is spent on non-revenue generating activities.

What really struck me is how much time sales reps spend on internal policies and approval. My goodness, it’s the second most time-consuming task in the day. Here’s the breakdown:

• Sales reps spend 15.7% of their time on meetings and customer interactions
• Dealing with internal policies and approvals takes 12.8% of their time
• Another 12% is taken up by researching target accounts and contacts

But how effective are all of these tasks, anyway?

Well, we asked that as well and the results were telling.

Effectiveness on Sales Tasks

People hate meetings and internal policies, they are necessary evil of any company. Sales reps reported that time spent on Facebook and catching up with colleagues was 7% more effective than internal meetings and dealing with internal policies.

Think about that.

Sales reps would rather spend time on social media than be internal meetings!

Meetings, dealing with internal policies and administrative tasks are killing your sales.

CRM Rated as the Most Ineffective System

What about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software? Every sales organization uses this type of system to manage and nurture their leads. You’d think they would find it effective.

The stats show otherwise.

Surprisingly, sales reps spend only 18.0% of their time in CRM, the foundational system for sales teams.

Because of the inefficiency of CRM, sales reps report that 9.7% of their time (over half the amount of time spent in CRM) is spent in spreadsheets. Basically, they are trying to more effectively manage CRM related tasks.

In terms of valuable systems, CRM was rated lowest. They also explicitly called CRM out as the most frustrating or not directly valuable to a sales reps objectives.

At XANT, we’ve been preaching this for a while.

CRM is a necessary system as a record keeping mechanism, but look to sales technologies that help reps sell more as the predominant area where reps see value and therefore spend their time.

Download the Time Management for Sales Study

Sales is a complicated profession, and time management can make or break your performance. This has been an eye-opening study, and I encourage anyone in the sales industry to download the executive summary and read it.

Download the study to learn:

• What are the activities that sales reps find more useful and effective in their profession
• What are the tools that sales reps rate the highest and as most valuable
• How companies can partner with sales reps to handle the issue of declining quota attainment

A direct mailer is a physical item (note, gifts, etc) mailed to a prospect or customer to initiate a conversation or build a relationship. Direct mailers are simply another form of communication. Most people know and use phone, text, voicemail, email, and social, but they don’t use mailers and they should.

Direct mail has become the norm in business to consumer (B2C) sales where studies show “40% of consumers have made a purchase in the last three months because of a piece of direct mail they received.” Business to Business (B2B) has lagged behind in their use of direct mail with only 38.5% of companies reporting they use direct mail and only 30% reporting using it in prospecting activities. This dynamic appears to be changing as data shows that of B2B sales technologies, direct mail capabilities is in the top five in expected growth for 2018 (11.4%).

To better understand this important communication method and its effects in the B2B environment, XANT Labs commissioned a study with 330 respondents. These were B2B associates, managers, and leaders. We tried to understand the opinions of those that may send or receive direct mail.

Sending Direct Mail

Only 38.5% of companies report using direct mail as part of their business. The main reasons companies do not use mailers is cost (44.3%) and time (22.9%). One XANT Labs experiment showed it took 58 minutes to write and send one handwritten note with an estimated cost of time and goods at $48.01.

Medium size organizations ($50-$500 million in revenue) are the largest adopters of direct mail (53.1%). This is 81.8% higher than large companies ($500 million in revenue). Of companies who use direct mail, the average number of pieces sent in a given month is 151.6.

How Do Companies Use Direct Mail?

Our study had some interesting results in respects to the effectiveness and use cases for direct mail. We could see what companies were actually using and what works for them. Here’s what we found out:

• The most cost effective and the most popular direct mail items are cards (44.2% of companies send either printed or handwritten notes)
• The most common use case for direct mail is attempting to initiate a conversation with a prospect (41.2%).
• Welcoming a new client who has recently signed up with your company is the second most popular use case (21.1%).
• The most common offer in mailers is information with a basic call to action (43.7%).

Of companies surveyed, the biggest challenge in sending direct mailers, is determining the right people to send them to (27.3%) and verifying the physical address (19.8%).

Why Direct Mail Trumps Email

Overall, direct mail had the highest perceived response rate among any communication method with 66.1% of respondents saying they were likely to respond to a direct mail piece. This was 34.7% better than the perceived response rate with email.

Interestingly, leaders follow a similar pattern as the general audience as 65.6% of leaders said they were likely to respond to direct mailers. As far as which direct mail is more effective, we got some info for you:

• Respondents were most likely to respond to handwritten notes (77.1% say they respond to this type of direct mail)
• Pens and mugs were the most popular gifts
• Amazon and Starbucks were the most popular gift cards
• Cheap gifts with a perceived value under $11.40 (average) reflected poorly on the response rates and the image of a company sending the gift.

When asked what category of gifts were most persuasive, respondents said they were more likely to respond to useful gifts (47.3%) than edible gifts (3.7%) by 43.6 percentage points.

Conclusion: It’s the Message, Not the Gift!

Most respondents said mailers played a large role in their likeliness to respond. However, the combination of mailers in conjunction with strong messaging was the most powerful. The ability of the rep to personalize the message and have a compelling offer were the two strongest reasons prospects responded to direct mailers.

That’s a wrap. If you’d like to learn more about direct mailers grab our GamePlan here:

Playmakers, we need your help! We’re conducting research on what kind of gifts work best to engage with your prospects. There are not a lot of surveys out there available that show exactly what works and what doesn’t when it comes to high impact mailers. So, if you’ve been sending little gift cards to your prospects, take the survey and let us know! We will send you the result of the survey when it is complete, so you’ll have access to benchmark info from hundreds of other companies.

We’ve been tracking high impact mailers (physical items you can send to prospects) for over a year. When looking at the market, it looks like most people are sending whatever they wanted whenever they wanted.

There are different types of mailers and different uses case. Salespeople are often sending:

• Printed cards or notes
• Hand-written notes or cards
• E-Gifts (email with code to redeem gift)
• Gift cards
• Gifts without your company branding
• Gifts with your company branding

All of these are very effective and can be used to progress a sale or build a relationship.

I’ve now sent and tested hundreds of mailers (I’ll be publishing my findings over the coming months) but we need more information and that’s where you come in.

Let’s learn together. XANT Labs is performing a study on high impact mailers. The objectives are the following:

• Understand how B2B companies are currently thinking about and using high impact mailers
•  Determine why some B2B companies are not using high impact mailers
•  Understand the opinions and perspectives of B2B leaders who receive (or might receive) high impact mailers

It’s going to be epic. We already have 200 companies but I want 1,000 and with your help I know we can do it. Take five minutes, take the survey and get ready to have some fun sending high impact mailers as part of the XANT product suite!

You can take our survey here: https://bit.ly/highimpactmailer

Companies report only a 64% quota attainment, on average, for their sales development reps.

The “State of Sales Development 2017 study shows some stats on the activity and results of sales development reps in the United States. The report also looks at the sales technology systems they use and the structure of sales development organizations.

Sales Development in 2017 – How 900 Companies Do SDR

Here’s just a few things we learned with this poll:

• Sales development reps have an annual quota of $658K;
• They have around 14 meaningful conversations per day;
• They also send around 37 emails per day;
• And they place around 36 phone calls every day;
• They also  send around 15 voicemails and have about 8 social media activities every day.

The State of Sales Development focused on 900 companies and reviewed the four elements of building an optimized sales development organization: structure, technology, people and pipeline. The study was created by XANT in partnership with SalesForLife, BridgeGroup, Drift, Datanyze, OneMob, and Tenbound.

You can download the report below:

Or you can download the infographic that shows every-day activity of a sales development rep.

They’re the engine that puts fuel in your sales pipeline – day in and day out.

This is why it is crucial to understand and know the structure of sales development, the specific activities for pipeline generation and above all, the people and what they do to guarantee the health of your pipeline

In an effort to understand the sales development role, XANT Labs commissioned a study in partnership with SalesForLife, BridgeGroup, Drift, Datanyze, OneMob, and Tenbound.

The study includes 900 companies and reviews the four elements of a successful sales development team: structure, systems, people and pipeline.

The findings were very telling of where we are today with SDR and where there is a gap in their activity.

Inside vs Outside Sales Development

The lines between inside sales and outside sales keep blurring, shows the research. More and more customers are empowered and contacting companies, rather than waiting to be contacted.

According to the study, there are an estimated 677,479 sales development reps in the U.S.

About 17 percent of sales development reps are inbound sales, while 28% are outbound sales. More than half – 54 percent self-report as doing both inside and outside sales.

Sales Technology Systems

Sales technology has become an extremely important part of every sales development team’s makeup and organization. Companies spend overall on sales development technology is $1.4 billion. This is just a small part of the overall 14.9 billion spent in total on sales technology industry.

In the research, companies reported the average annual spend on sales technology was $3,894 per rep/year.

That’s around 17% less than what they spend on account executives, who seem to get the lion’s share of the budget. Companies have around one sales development rep for every three account executives.

The $3,894 covers an average of 4.8 categories of sales tools per rep. The most popular categories were (excluding CRM):

• Social prospecting (30.3%)
• Data/list services (21.6%)
• Email engagement (20.7%)
• Phone (16.0%)
• Sales Cadence (12.8%)
• Lead/Account Scoring (10.7%)

Sales Development – The People

Companies need to pay market value to retain their top people. The Sales of Sales Development offers a benchmark on sales development compensation.

According to the XANT research, the average base salary for sales development reps is $41,675, with an average on-target-earnings (OTE) of &80,774. While earnings will vary based on the region, there is one aspect which remains constant – and that is variable income.

A section of sales representatives’ incomes are variable to ensure performance and quota attainment. The mix between base and variable was a 60/40 split, with 59.7% for the base and 40.03% for the variable.

Pipeline Generation Activities

As far activities go, sales development reps are certainly not idle – they place dozens of calls and send a host of emails and voicemails every day to generate qualified pipeline.

Sales development reps did an average of 94.4 daily activities including an average of 36.2 emails (38.4%), 35.9 phone calls (38.0%), 15.3 voicemail messages (16.2%), and 7.0 social media touches (7.4%).

They reps had an average of 14.1 meaningful conversations a day, which was around 15 percent of their daily activities.

For all their effort, not all sales development reps are able to reach 100% of their quota.

Why Sales Development Reps Only Report 63% Quota Attainment

The quota for pipeline generated was $658,692, however companies report only 63.5% quota attainment for SDRs.

The report is an eye-opener for sales leaders interested in increasing their team’s performance.

For high-performing teams, the combination of sales training, self-motivated sales reps and AI-recommended lead prioritization can mean the difference between failure and success.

Sales leaders need to see this as an opportunity to make changes – and act on it. We need to enable sales reps to work smarter, rather than harder.

You can read the executive summary of the State of Sales Development 2017 here.

The State of Sales Development – New Research

The “State of Sales Development – 2017” (to not be confused with “State of Sales 2017”) is an amazing piece of research that shows what the industry looks like when it comes to professionals building qualified pipeline.

It paints a picture of how sales development reps are using technology to grow their pipeline, what processes and activities have the most yield, and what their compensation structure looks like.

XANT created this study in partnership with SalesForLife, BridgeGroup, Drift, Datanyze, OneMob, and Tenbound. The study focused on 900 companies. It will give you the four elements of building an optimized sales development organization as well as examined four-steps of successful sales development teams:

• Sales Structure
• Sales Technology Systems
• People
• Pipeline

If you’re in sales development (or sales leadership), you would do well to take a look at this study.

You can get the executive summary of the research here.

XANT at the Tenbound Conference

I loved the presentation at Tenbound, and I loved to present there! Watch the video below if you don’t believe how awesome it was!

We’ve had a host of incredible speakers, among which: Carrie Simpson (CEO of Managed Sales Pros), Mike Vandenbos (Founder of Zipwhip), Mark Gonyea (Cofounder of memoryBlue), Jacob Shaffren (Director of Sales Development at DiscoverOrg) and Chris Beall (CEO at ConnectAndSell).

The G Show is Gabe Larsen’s weekly show about the sales industry. We post short videos weekly to give you the scoop on what’s happening in the sales industry, and what strategies sales reps are using to reach their numbers.

Subscribe to the DailyG below:

Among these is Labs’ recent study on the evolution of business communications, which you need to read if you want to see where these technologies are headed.

Jamie Herzlich at Newsday took a look at the study and followed up with an interview of our president and founder Ken Krogue. The resulting piece is really solid and serves as a perfect entree to the subject.

In today’s market, sales professionals are swimming in a sea of choices. The options for online lead generation alone are overwhelming–email, search marketing, blogs, videos, mobile ads, webinars–so it comes as no surprise that sales and marketing teams having conflicting thinking on where to start when it comes to generating leads.

XANT decided to shine a light on the most used and most effective lead generation tactics as well as how sales and marketing professionals view the effectiveness of these methods.

What follows is a snapshot of what we discovered.

What’s Keeping Us Up at Night? Top B2B Challenges

According to the survey, nearly half (49%) of all sales and marketing representatives believe that not generating enough leads is their top marketing challenge.

The Top Five B2B Challenges:

1. Generating More Leads – 49%
2. Converting Leads to Customers – 43%
3. Improving Lead Quality – 39%
4. Reaching decision makers – 37%
5. Increasing Product Awareness – 31%

However, this data was split along company size. Companies with smaller marketing budgets (below $499,000) saw an insufficient quantity of leads as their top challenge. For companies with a budget of $500,000 and up, their challenges changed to place improving lead quality, reaching decision makers, improving sales support as number one.

For companies looking to increase their lead generation and increase opportunities for their sales team, the marketing budget may be the first step to changing things around.

All in on LinkedIn?

Move over, Zuckerberg and Dorsey: It’s no longer just about Facebook or Twitter. According to the survey, LinkedIn now leads the pack when it comes to professional connections and with that, sales and marketing opportunities. In the past four years, XANT’s survey found that LinkedIn’s effectiveness to generate leads has jumped 28%, compared to Twitter’s 10%.

However, before you start using LinkedIn as your only method for lead generation, take a quick pause. What’s hot may not yet be the most effective. Here is what the data shows:

Top Five Adopted Lead Generation Methods:

1. Company Website – 83%
2. Email – 74%
3. LinkedIn – 69%
4. Tradeshows – 62%
5. Blogs – 53%

Top Five Most Effective Lead Generation Methods:

1. Small Executive Events – 77%
2. Webinars – 73%
3. Tradeshows – 72%
4. Sales Development – 72%
5. Virtual Events – 71%

That doesn’t mean LinkedIn won’t come to dominate the space, but for now, it’s not even listed in the five most effective methods. A look at the most effective list from the survey shows the need for financial resources and a dedicated, hands-on approach. Taking the time and resources to curate webinars, tradeshows and small executive events is well worth it.

Lead generation methods vary greatly by effectiveness.

When it comes to satisfaction and choice of methods for the future, inside sales leads the pack. The survey found that more companies are willing to try inside sales this year (13%), with 93% of companies who currently use inside sales, pledging to continue their use.

Hey, if you find a good thing, you stick with it.

All of this data and more can be seen in the full Lead Generation Methods report, available here.

We’d love to hear from you in the comments below–what do you think is the most effective lead generation method and which are over-hyped?