Benchmark Your Sales Development Prospecting Pipeline

It’s 2019 and its time to benchmark your sales development team. We did our annual state of sales development survey and asked each company to give us their prospecting pipeline from contacts to opportunities. You ready to see what they said and see how you compare?

Let’s dive in…the average sales development rep is managing around 100 accounts and a little over five contacts per account, so think of it like 578 contacts in their prospecting pipeline at any given time.

Now in total, the average rep is doing 107.8 activities per day which is slightly up from last year. There is a 10.1% conversion rates so the typical rep is having about 11 conversations a day. 11.0% of those conversations are turning into appointments so sales development reps are doing 36 appointments per month per rep. I was surprised about this one but companies report a 78.9% hold rate on appointments so you’re getting 28 appointments held per person per month. 19 ops are created from those held appointments but only 14.6 are actually sales accepted opportunities which leads to 67.4% of sales development reps hitting quota.

Here are the surprises for me:

Contacts That SDR’s Are Managing

This is not as big of a number as you may think it is and here is why. The average team reports only managing 103 accounts. However, in those accounts they are going deeper with 5ish contacts. This is why an SDR is actively trying to manage 500+ contacts.

SDR Activities Per Month

These crossed the 100 mark this year per rep per month. That’s a lot, especially as we think about the transition to account-based sales development strategies.

Conversation Rate

I like this. I think it is really close to accurate. 10% of activities lead to a meaningful conversations. It’s scary because there is still a lot of wasted activity, but it goes to show how hard salesmen earn their keep.

Appointments Held Rate

The very high percentage is awesome, when we look at this data (78% appointments held rate). But because this number is difficult to track, I’m actually worried some companies think they are higher than they really are.

Sales Accepted Opportunities

I like this number (14.6 sales accepted opportunities per month). I think it’s a good blend of inbound teams who are doing 20-30 and outbound enterprise teams who are doing 4-12.

Quota Attainment for SDR’s

Probably the biggest surprise from the prospecting pipeline numbers for me was the nearly 70% of SDRs hitting quota, while research says only 53% of AEs hit quota.

Quota attainment is going to continue to be a problem until companies figure out a way to bring SDRs and AEs closer together.

To get the infographic go here: