Sales Cycles

Generating new business can often be a challenge and a long process. Depending on your industry and what you are selling will have a factor on your sales cycle and how long it will take to generate a lead and then turn that lead into a new customer. Below are some general averages on the amount of time required to generate new customers across all industries.

This will give you a sense for if you have an efficient sales cycle or not.

Average Amount Of Prospects That Are Closed In The Following Time Frames (All Industries)

0-6 months = 23-37%

7-12 months = 15-18%

12-18 months = 25-33%

18+ months = 19-25%

This means if you are generating over 60% of your new customers in less then 12 months of prospecting and nurturing you are doing a good job.

Another factor to consider is are you focusing your efforts on generating new leads or nurturing existing leads. In most business to business companies your sales pipeline will look something like this

Leads that are sales ready = 0-20%

Leads that require further nurturing = 10-60%

Leads that are going to be or should be disqualified = 10-20%

Given a large portion of your leads are most likely in the nurture stage and that 3 out 4 new sales usually come from the nurture stage make sure you are putting enough focus on this part of your sales cycle. Keep these states in mind when developing your lead generation, sales and marketing plans and it may be able to increase your success rate. If nothing else it will give you a good benchmark to compare yourself against.

If you would like more information on what are the most successful methods for B2B businesses to acquire new customers read my blog article titled B2B Promotion

Source: What's Working In Lead Generation - RainToday.com

My name is Chris R. Keller. I work at Profitworks Small Business Services helping various B2B small businesses in Waterloo and Kitchener Ontario generate new customers. If you are interested in generating new customers for your B2B small businesses enter your email in the box provided below and click the "Send Me Free Updates" button. You will then receive free updates from this blog.

I hope this article on sales cycles was informative. Thanks for reading.