Many of you have emailed us to say that you love the “Number of the Week” feature. Well, we like writing it up, since we get to learn all kinds of interesting (and weird) stuff about sales and the business world in general. 
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Since it’s such a popular feature, we figured we’d expand on it, so we went searching high and low for what we think are the most interesting (newly available) statistics about sales. 
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We tried to avoid the boring stuff (the majority of the mind-numbing stats that companies publish in their white papers), and only focus on the facts that make you go: “Whoa, I didn’t know that.” If there are any other cool ones you come across, send us an email and let us know, and we might use them for future newsletters. 
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Here are 22 interesting sales stats for 2022:

1. Research shows that 35% to 50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. (source: InsideSales.com)

2. Only 5% of salespeople said leads they receive from marketing were very high quality. (source: HubSpot)

3. When leaving a voicemail for a prospect, the optimal length is between 8 and 14 seconds. (source: Spotio) 

4. Only 25% of marketing-generated leads are typically of a high enough quality to immediately advance to sales. (source: Gleanster Research)

5. 77% of sales reps reported working more hours now than before the pandemic. (source: Dooly)

6. The average yearly quota for an inside sales professional is $985,000. (source: Harvard Business Review)

7. The average yearly quota for outside sales reps is approximately $2.7M. (source: Harvard Business Review)

8. Best-in-class companies close 30% of sales qualified leads, while average companies close 20%. (source: PointClear)

9. 66.7% of sales reps have only reached out to 250 people or less in a year. (source: Sales Insights Lab)

10. 91% of customers say they’d give referrals. Only 11% of salespeople ask for referrals. (source: Wharton School of Business) 

11. Sales reps who make at least 12 contact attempts perform 20% better than reps who stop at 8 attempts. (source: Bridge Group)

12. The average number of tools in a company’s sales tech stack is unlucky number 13. (source: Dooly)

13. In a typical firm with 100-500 employees, an average of 7 people are involved in most buying decisions. (source: Gartner)

14. Sales reps can spend up to 40% of their time just looking for somebody to call. (source: Inside Sales)

15. 50% of buyers like speaking over the phone, compared to 70% of reps. This percentage increases the higher up the ladder (VP or C-suite) you go. (source: Spotio) 

16. 44% of sales reps give up after 1 follow-up. (source: Spotio) 

17. It takes 10 months or more for a new sales rep to be fully productive. (source: Spotio) 

18. The typical account executive spends 2.7 years on the job and takes 4.7 months to ramp up. (source: Bridge Group)

19. Drift tested the response time of 433 companies. Only 7% responded in the first five minutes after a form submission. Over 50% didn’t respond within five business days. (source: Drift)

20. Average (B2B) Lead to Close length is 102 days (source: Salesforce)

21. According to a recent survey, 84% of all sales training is lost after 90 days. This is majorly due to the lack of information retention among sales personnel. (source: Spotio) 

22. Optimistic sales pros outperform pessimists by 57%. That’s even true when pessimists have better selling skill sets. (source: Forbes)