6 Surprising Sales Statistics that highlight the need for People Intelligence

Let's face it—outside of working capital, sales are the true lifeblood for any business. A common focus for organizations going into 2022 will be to improve sales. Consultants, gurus, and media outlets know this and are in full swing producing articles to help organizations achieve new sales goals in 2022.

The only problem with these articles is that although the renewed focus on sales is timely and relevant, the solutions, advice, and ideas in these articles simply repeat and refine the same foundational direction from 2021, 2020, 2019, and so on.

They are all putting their spin on fundamentals that always apply regardless of the year/challenge/industry. Fundamentals such as:

• Asking questions and listening
• Standing out from competition / Differentiation
• Overcoming objections
• Understanding customers (what they need and why they buy)
• Pushing for decisions

And they are writing about them in ways to help achieve one or a variation of the following sales goals:

• Increase monthly/annual revenue
• Reduce customer churn
• Increase units sold
• Boost profit margins
• Increase customer lifetime values
• Increase marketing qualified or sales-accepted leads
• Increase win/close rates
• Reduce customer acquisition costs
• Reduce sales cycle times

For organizations seeking to achieve new sales goals in 2022, these articles will only enable incremental change because they are incrementally different from what is already common knowledge. If you seek to reach sales performance that you have never achieved before, these articles, thinking, and approaches will not get you there.

At VoiceSignals, we aren't advocating for you to abandon fundamentals—far from it. However, what we are advocating for is integrating people intelligence into the sales process to multiply the impact of fundamentals exponentially.

The advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, combined with increased processing power, has created the massive potential to impact sales performance. To appreciate the impact that People Intelligence can have on your 2022 sales goals, we need to look no further than these six surprising sales statistics:

1. The average sales rep makes 52 calls every day
2. 42% of sales reps feel they don't have enough information before making a call
3. 92% of all customer interactions happen on the phone
4. 80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls
5. 85% of prospects and customers are dissatisfied with their on-the-phone experience
6. 50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting

Closing a deal now involves ten more buying interactions than ever before to complicate things further. Although the number of buying interactions has increased slightly every two years (e.g., from 16 to 17 between 2017 and 2019), the number of buying interactions during the pandemic jumped from 17 to 27.

With the number of buying interactions increasing and the growing role that calls play in them, People Intelligence can have the most significant influence on whether your organization meets or exceeds its sales goals for 2022. Your calls and buying interactions are generating massive amounts of raw data—data that would have gone untapped due to technical limitations can now produce actionable insights.

VoiceSignal's People Intelligence Platform® (PIP®) combines psychological and behavioral science with AI and Machine learning to extract Real-Time Speech Analytics from voice data to understand emotions, sentiments, and personality traits—and ultimately predict aspects of future behavior, turning an often-overlooked source of big data into a competitive advantage.

When you know how someone will react, you can strategically decide your next step—transforming sales cycles and mitigating risk. Imagine applying People Intelligence to the 52 calls your salespeople make on an average day. Those 52 calls become 52 opportunities to satisfy prospects with their on-the-phone experience by providing your people with the insights to drive the conversation predictably.

People Intelligence will also equip your salespeople with the information they need before making a call (and during the call). Information such as the interest and openness of the individual on the other end, alerting your people of shifts in mood and other predictive behaviors so that they can guide the conversation accordingly. Make ineffective prospecting a thing of the past by using People Intelligence to qualify leads based on their likelihood to convert, not based on demographic data alone.

To achieve your sales goals in 2022 will require a focus on the fundamentals, but in a new way, through the lens of People Intelligence. The sales world is already heading in this direction, and quickly—77% of sales professionals say their sales organization plans to invest 'significantly more' or 'more' in sales intelligence tools.

Don't settle for incremental progress when it comes to achieving your sales goals in the coming year—seize the opportunity of People Intelligence and make an exponential leap. Learn how you can seamlessly add People Intelligence to your sales strategy. Extract valuable insights from your data to immediately make better decisions and achieve better outcomes for your business—schedule a demo today.