New InsightSquared Data Exposes the Unexpected Secret to High-Growth Software Sales

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 5, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Contrary to conventional wisdom that generating more leads is the key to sales success, a new study reveals that top-performing SaaS industry sales teams instead rely on more effective lead qualification and high-efficiency sales processes to close nearly 3-times larger deals from 60% fewer opportunities. This unexpected revelation proves the real secret to success is that quality trumps quantity when it comes to filling the funnel with the most promising opportunities.

That's according to a new benchmarking report and infographic published today by InsightSquared, the award-winning provider of business analytics software for small and midsize companies. The report analyzed performance data from more than 50 growing software companies to reveal key insights into what separates fast-growth companies from the average sales team. In "New Benchmarks for High-Growth Inside Sales Teams," researchers compared sales cycle, win rate and deal size data for companies with 100% or more sales growth versus those generating less than 100% growth over the past 12 months.

Key findings from the analysis include:

• High-growth sales teams generate 40% more leads each month, but create 60% fewer opportunities.
• Fast-growth companies win deals that are 2.8-times larger than those won by slow-growth companies.
• Larger deals have a 40% longer sales cycle, require 30% more work and have a 20% lower win rate, but yield a 70% higher return than average deals.

"Some of what we found went against conventional wisdom, for instance the fact that fast-growth companies seem to win only 0.4 times the number of deals as slow-growth companies," said report co-author Zorian Rotenberg, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at InsightSquared. "But on closer inspection, it seems that high-growth teams are simply more efficient in carefully choosing which opportunities to pursue, as a result closing 2.8-times larger deals to fuel faster growth."

The fact that larger deals require more work, take longer and have a lower win rate than average-size deals all clearly indicate that high-growth teams are simply more efficient. They are able to choose the most promising opportunities to pursue and better manage the pipeline and resources to push larger deals through the funnel without wasting time on dead-end deals.

In fact, the research shows that fast-growth companies achieve 20% higher productivity in the sales process by qualifying fewer leads more effectively, simultaneously working more opportunities and focusing on fewer, but larger, opportunities.

Rotenberg says that, aside from focusing on lead qualification and opportunity identification, high-performance teams also need powerful analytics and business intelligence tools to analyze pipeline performance and historical sales data, identify pipeline trends and buyer commonalities, measure rep and team performance to maximize sales and provide data-driven sales coaching.

"It's tough to identify what's holding your sales team back if you can't accurately measure performance and provide real-time insight to reps and managers in a way they can understand and use it to improve," Rotenberg said. "With InsightSquared, even SMBs can tap into the same robust data analytics that have traditionally been available only to companies with big budgets."

To download and read the full report and view the infographic, visit learn.insightsquared.com/Benchmarking. To learn more about InsightSquared's Salesforce analytics and business intelligence platform for sales and marketing, visit www.insightsquared.com.

About InsightSquared
InsightSquared is the innovative leader in Salesforce Analytics and modern business intelligence for sales and marketing. Unlike legacy Business Intelligence platforms, InsightSquared can be deployed affordably in less than a day without any integration costs and comes preloaded with reports that real business people can use. Hundreds of companies and thousands of users around the world use InsightSquared's award-winning analytics to maximize sales performance, increase team productivity and close more deals. Based in Cambridge, Mass., InsightSquared was recently named one of the "Best Places to Work in Massachusetts" by the Boston Business Journal and "Top Places to Work 2013" by The Boston Globe.  For more information, visit www.insightsquared.com.

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SOURCE InsightSquared