The manufacturing industry takes the lead in sales conversion rates, according to a recent report.
The data comes from Pipedrive, which looks at sales by country and by industry in an annual survey. A conversion rate of 31.12 percent puts manufacturing at the top of the conversion rate league table in 2017, followed by trade (22.36 percent) and construction (18.96 percent). Salespeople in manufacturing are also quicker than average to close a deal, 37.1 days on average.
The report attributes this in part to a need for reliability.“Manufacturing can be an industry that is complex and labor intensive, where multiple parts often physically move locations, which can be very costly. As this can affect profits, there is a greater need to qualify any deal well ahead of time rather than meet a large volume of unknown prospects," said Timo Rein, Pipedrive co-founder and CEO, in a press release.
In general, Rein said, organizations that concentrate on getting a few high-value deals perform better overall than those which try to acquire many low-performing deals.
“Generally speaking, high-performing organizations add half as many deals into their pipeline, but win at least twice as many,” he said. “Great salespeople are especially careful about not filling their days with conversations leading to nowhere. At the same time, once they’ve detected a potential prospect, they use all their intelligence and experience to maximize their chances of winning.”
Manufacturing was also shown to be an area in which salespeople and prospective clients prefer to meet face-to-face rather than over email.
More data can be found here. The Global Sales Performance Review shows patterns in sales across 34 countries, including how quickly deals close, how many prospects convert, and how laborious the deal-making process is depending on location. Pipedrive examined 70,000 organizations across 34 countries to collect this data. Of those, about 7 percent or 2,331 businesses were manufacturers.