I came across an interesting piece on Inside Sales from the Bridge Group based in the US.

They've published a "Periodic Table of Inside Sales Metrics", which is an interesting way of presenting many of the metrics they've researched.

The Bridge Group specialises in consulting on Inside Sales for technology vendors and their president, Trish Bertuzzi, is founder and manager of the Inside Sales Experts group on LinkedIn.

Looking at the metrics they present, there are some interesting ones from a telesales perspective (what we would typically refer to "Inside Sales" as in the UK)

Under lead generation, the average quota for appointments per inside sales rep is 16 per month. Also, the average hours per day on the phone for lead generation is 4 hours.

Now, I know from reading other articles published by The Bridge Group that many of the inside sales people surveyed are also responding to and qualifying inbound leads so this doesn't mean that 4 hours a day, 20 days a week generates 16 appointments from outbound cold calling.

To me, that's not a million miles off our experience in lead generation and appointment setting for technology vendors.

We figure that one of our team (focused purely on outbound lead generation) can generate a qualified appointment every 1 to 1.5 days for a technology proposition.

Based on The Bridge Group's figures their on quota average is 1.4 per day but, as I said, that will be a mixture of inbound and outbound lead sources. Which means I think we're broadly on the same page.

Also, I liked the metric that that average ramp-up time for an inside sales rep was 4.5 months.

If only we had that long :-)

Labels: appointment setting, inside sales, sales lead generation, telesales