• by Ray Schultz , July 31, 2017

Email is the top tool in B2B sales outreach, according to a study by InsideSales.com. 

Of the companies studied, 32% use email, resulting in 61% of first contacts. Second is a single call and voicemail (6%).

A single email is the most common vehicle, followed by a single phone call with a voicemail second, and two emails the third-most common.

The typical email contains 362 words. And almost half of all voicemails are over 30 seconds.

In studying sales cadences, InsideSales.com found that the median gap between the first and second sales touch is 16 hours, 45 minutes.

This eventually increases to six days and 21 hours — the maximum gap — between stages six and seven. After eight attempts, the median gap hits seven days.

In addition, the study found that the average number of attempts per lead was 4.05, and the typical gap between efforts was 4.23 days. 

The software business has the longest median time — 61 days. The shortest belongs to the transportation industry: 12 days.

The median contact time is 7.4 days in the UK, compared to 4.9 days in the U.S.

“Perfecting cadence is a core component of both the art and science of effective inside sales,” states Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com. “When sales reps lead with an unstructured cadence, they put potential sales at risk. Optimal cadences can boost results by up to 110 percent.”

InsideSales.com says it studied 14,331 cadences, made up of 144,976 activities, on the part of 8,742 companies.