The B2B Sales Benchmarks You’ve Been Missing: The Outbound Index

As a sales leader or executive at a growing B2B tech company you need to know two things — how much return can you realistically expect on your cold calling efforts? And is your team truly performing up to speed?

Introduction: You Don’t Need to Operate in the Dark

OpenView recently published a report on nine B2B sales benchmarks that can help companies build scalable sales and outbound lead generation teams. One of the sources included in that report was the new Outbound Index, a new semiannual benchmarks report built to be “the first ever barometer of outbound prospecting efforts for B2B technology companies.”
In addition to a headline index, the first release of the report focuses on delivering answers to the following:

• How is outbound doing?
• What is selling now?
• Who is converting to pipeline?
• What happened last quarter and what is in store for the rest of the year?

After reviewing the report (produced via collaboration between The Bridge Group and AG Salesworks) we felt that it was really one of the best index reports available on the web for outbound lead generation, so we decided to interview the authors of the report, B2B sales and marketing consultant Matt Bertuzzi and Peter Gracey, COO and co-founder of AG Salesworks.

How Growing Software Companies Can Put the Outbound Index to Use

How to Apply the Benchmarks

In this video, Matt offers his take on how expansion-stage technology companies should be using sales benchmarks. The big reason why companies should know the index for these metrics? So they can understand where they are excelling and where they need to improve based on industry standards. “Are they driving a van or a maserati?”

Know What to Expect

Peter points out expansion-stage companies in particular don’t always have enough data to know what their model will look like. They can use the Outbound Index to get a good idea of what to expect if they are building a team for the first time.

Be Prepared

Both agree it’s better to know what you’re up against ahead of time and to have data to back that up.

Understand Your Team’s Requirements

Sales managers and executives can also use the benchmarks to build and manage their outbound lead generation teams.

About the Outbound Index: Actionable Insight from Real-World Data

Overview

Matt and Peter provide an overview of the Outbound Index and the key metrics that are included in the report.

Real World Data

Learn more about what makes the data in the Outbound Index so exciting.

Addressing the Challenges of Sales Benchmarking

Sales and outbound lead generation benchmarks can be tough to generate because every company has its own definitions and follows its own process for outreach, hiring, training, and onboarding its reps. Matt explains how access to data from AG Salesworks allowed them to deal with those challenges in this report.

Key Findings

Defining the Headline Metric

Out of 1,000 accounts prospected in a given quarter, how many opportunities should enter pipeline?

Hot Markets

There was a lot of variation between markets. There are “hot” markets that it turns out that are hard to get to pipeline, and there are a lot of “boring” companies that are actually easier to get appointments with.

Markets with the Best Index

The markets with the best index were: Backup, Security, and Marketing/Sales automation. The markets with the lowest index were: Big data, HR/Talent Management Software, and ERP.

Roles within the Organization

There was a lot of variation between roles within organization. Certain roles get passed a lot for often. Senior level, and manager level people were getting passed a lot more often than upper middle management. The data showed that a lot of manager level people are a lot more involved with deals than most people think.

Brand Recognition

There was even variation between companies with brand name recognition vs. new companies with no name recognition. Companies with more brand recognition have a higher reach rate, than new companies with less brand recognition.

About AG Salesworks

Behind the Collaboration

Why was AG Salesworks willing to open the kimono and share its data for the Outbound Index report?
Download the Outbound Index at the Bridge Group Inc.