Setting the Scene
Outbound sales is a numbers game. Before you get started with your outreach, you need to set concrete goals, decide upon the metrics that you wish to use to measure your success, and set a benchmark of comparison from which you can build.
Start by thinking about:
- How many accounts and contacts do you wish to engage with
- How many emails you will send out per day
- How many touches—or, number of times you engage a prospect—you will include in each sequence
If you have run previous campaigns, you can use your historical data as a benchmark of comparison. If this is your first outbound campaign, you can use the sample metrics in this module as a reference so that when you start to gather the results from your new campaigns, you will have quantitative data to measure against your results. There are a number of data points you can focus on. We’d recommend concentrating on the following to begin with:
- % of email open rates
- % of replies
- % of interested contacts
- The number of meetings set
- The number of closed/won deals
Start by drafting out the data points that you want to gather in your own Outbound Sales Metrics table:
| Type of Metric | Data Points to Measure | Benchmark Metrics |
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| Targeting |
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| Activity |
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| Quality of Activity |
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| Results |
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| Sales Cycle |
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Each metric you measure will provide you with key insights into the growth and health of your sales strategies. Gathering the data and analyzing the performance of your sales efforts allows you to constantly review, experiment, and improve to reach your sales targets.
Apollo Example
In the table below, we have included sample metrics that you can use as a benchmark when first starting out.
| Type of Metric | Data Points to Measure | Benchmark Results | My Metrics: Month 1 | Analysis |
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| Targeting |
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| Activity |
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| Quality of Activity |
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| Results |
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| Sales Cycle |
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The more data you gather and metrics you measure, the less relevant these benchmark statistics will become. Over time, you will need to use your historical data as the biggest judge of your progress; adapting your target metrics to fit your specific business, industry, and market.
Dissecting the Numbers
Once you decide upon the number of companies that you want to target—between 100 and 1,000 is a good starting point—you need to decide how many contacts you will target within each account and how many times you will engage with each person. We recommend that you start by contacting at least 2-5 contacts from within the same company and sending at least 2-5 emails to each.
Make sure you don’t engage with all of the contacts at the same company at the same time. Instead, try to space out your communications with prospects from the same company across multiple days.
Now that you know how many accounts you want to target, think about how many emails you should send in a day. A good benchmark for Apollo users is anywhere between 200-500 emails per rep, per day. This provides you with a large enough sample size to analyze the quality of the activity and calculate the conversion rates between opened emails, replies, meetings set, and closed deals.
You should also pay close attention to the % email interest rate. This is a key statistic that provides insight into the number of contacts that have confirmed they would like to attend a meeting from the total number of emails you sent out in a month. Using this information, you can then determine the conversion rates per sales rep. Generally speaking, each sales rep should be aiming to secure at least 10-20 meetings per month, but depending on your industry, coaching methods, and approach, one rep could set up as many as 50-100 meetings per month.
The more meetings you set, the better chance you have of closing deals. As a benchmark, try to achieve at least a 20%-30% win rate by closing 2-5 deals per month per rep. But always keep in mind that these target metrics are according to the industry average. They give you an idea of the baseline statistics for outbound sales. However, after the first few months of outreach, you should be able to gain a better understanding of what’s possible for your company in your specific market. You can then adapt your sales targets accordingly.
Practical Exercise
Copy the benchmark results into the metrics table you created earlier and add two new columns for your own metrics and reflections. Please note, you won’t need to fill these columns in until you complete this course and begin executing your outbound sales strategy in Apollo, so keep the table handy and get ready to jump back into it when you have your first month of data to record and compare.
| Type of Metric | Data Points to Measure | Benchmark Results | My Metrics: Month 1 | Analysis |
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| Targeting |
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| Activity |
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| Quality of Activity |
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| Results |
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| Sales Cycle |
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Next Steps
Now that you have some sample metrics and key data points at the ready so that you can compare and calculate your team’s conversion rates, continue to the next article in this course to learn about how to "Create a Product Market Fit Canvas." In this next module, we will discuss the key role that your PMF hypothesis will play as you start to develop an effective outbound sales process for your company.