3 charts that show how to generate 50% more opportunities for your SaaS pipeline

The value of multi-threaded prospecting

Every sales leader wants to fill their pipeline with opportunities, yet so many struggle to get their prospecting motion working effectively. I’ve spent the last couple of years figuring out why and have found at least one solution that works near universally.

Over the past 18 months, I’ve collected and analyzed data from 20+ SaaS companies, data generated by salespeople using prospecting tools like Salesloft, Outreach and Apollo. The data set is quite big, spanning around 100k accounts, hundreds of thousands of outreach activities at 20+ sales teams with average deal sizes between $10k-$100k.

The insight that jumps out from the data is the incredible value of multi-threaded prospecting (reaching out to multiple contacts at the same account) over single-threaded prospecting (reaching out to a single contact per account).

While it sounds obvious, when you look at the data its quite eye-opening just how much of an impact it has on pipeline building.

Let’s get into it.

1. Multi-threaded prospecting leads to higher response rates

The more contacts you reach out at the same account, the more likely you are to get a response, because it stimulates internal conversations. As long as the contacts are relevant to what you are selling, the more people you reach out to the more likely your email will get forwarded internally with a note like, “Did you get this? What do you think?”. This invariably creates momentum for one of them to respond:

We can see that reaching out to just 3-5 contacts can almost triple the response rate! Finding 3-5 relevant people in a 100+ person company is not at all unrealistic if you consider that almost every SaaS purchase requires at least a champion, an economic buyer, a finance approver, a contract approver and often a power user. That’s 5 people right there! And for you overachievers out there, just look what happens when you reach out to 6+ contacts!

2. Higher response rates give you faster feedback

There is of course a trade-off between response rate and response to conversion rate because, in stimulating more internal conversations you will get more accounts actively telling you “no”, “not now”, “not a fit” etc. While this can feel bad, it should actually be celebrated because its 10x better than not knowing at all. After all, you want to get feedback from your target market as fast as possible so that you can refine your ideal customer profile.

We can see the response to conversion rate is highest when we prospect a single contact (aka single-threaded prospecting), but only 2x higher than when we prospect 3-5 contacts.

3. Multi-threaded prospecting generates more opportunities

When we put the two charts above together and calculate the overall account to opportunity conversion rate, we can see that the higher response rates more than offset the lower response to opportunity conversion rates, resulting in a 50% lift in opportunities from prospecting 3-5 contacts and a whopping 100%+ lift from prospecting 6+ contacts.

Curious how to identify the 3-5 contacts at your target accounts? The best place to start is by re-building your ideal customer profile and then building out your prospecting process.

I’d love to hear what else is working well for you in your prospecting motion!

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