Average conversion rates
November 09, 2020
by a searcher from INSEAD in Praha, Česko
Has anyone collected or seen a big enough dataset on average funnel /conversion rates and their ranges across searchers?
(owners contacted / follow-up conversation / first meeting / IOI submission / LOI submission / LOI signed)
I understand the sensitivity and variance, however it would be still great to see the averages and ranges for better funnel designs and benchmarking.
from University of Commerce Luigi Bocconi in London, UK
As you know Tomas, we did our search in 2013/2014 across Germany (the southern half of the country) and Switzerland (german speaking only) [so an area with a pop. of ca. 50M inhabitants and quite a strong & dense economic demography], and in the ca###-###-#### months we "fully" searched (not counting in the ramp up period, nor counting in the slow down period as we got to sign/close our deal) we had, on average per week, about###-###-#### personal meetings with "new" business owners (whom we had not met beforehand) respectively. It was rather 3 than 2 on average. Looking back, I would say###-###-#### % of those meetings came from proprietary outreach, which was our key focus and where about 90% of our efforts went into on a time-spent basis. Our highly customised proprietary postal mail outreach that lead to this was approx###-###-#### pieces over the###-###-#### months, with not too much focus on following up (perhaps we followed up on 15% of outreaches) - not because we were lazy but because we found that the personal meetings that resulted from our initial outreach kept us sufficiently busy and represented sufficient quality leads that we could take further into our funnel towards IOI, LOI etc.
I personally believe the actual search phase is all about trying different things and then doing more of what works, adapting what doesnt work to see if it then works, and eliminating the stuff that continues to not work. That will, over a period of###-###-#### months, eventually lead to an interesting SF deal I am convinced. It takes hard work, and a good portion of luck in my experience. :-)
from Yale University in Moscow, Russia
I especially would like to stress that the lower you go in the funnel, the more variability you get that often depends on your luck: sometimes for 25 calls you made you end up with 5 potential opportunities, sometimes with 10, sometimes with 0.
So, it goes:
-Contacted 200
-Replied 70
-Had a call or sent over CIM 35
-Had 2nd conversation 7
-Issue IOI 1-2 (mostly one, tbh)