Sales volume and response rates are falling

The economic impact of COVID-19 is undeniable. Businesses around the world are learning how to adapt to these new circumstances. We are all learning how to operate in a constantly changing “new normal.”

That’s why from now through the end of June, we’ll be publishing trend data week over week for core business metrics like website traffic, email send and open rates, sales engagements, close rates, and more. We plan to add additional cutouts, like channel and region, over time.

This week, we’ve added an extra dimension to our data set: company size. You can explore all of the data we’ve published here .

About the data

• These insights are based on aggregated data from over 70,000 HubSpot customers worldwide.
• The dataset includes weekly trend data for core business metrics in 2020, focusing on changes occurring during and after March 2020.*
• The charts in this post are measured with a benchmark on the y-axis. The benchmark for each metric was calculated by taking weekly averages from January 20, 2020, to March 9, 2020.
• HubSpot’s customer base data reflects benchmarks for companies that have invested in an online presence and use inbound as a key part of their growth strategy.

*The spread of COVID-19 has had a different timeline in different regions, so we’re using the World Health Organization’s declaration of a global armenia telemarketing pandemic on March 11, 2020 as our “official” start date.

NOTE: Because data is aggregated from HubSpot customer companies, please note that individual companies, including those within HubSpot, may differ based on their own markets, customer base, industry, geography, locale, and or other factors.

What we are seeing

After a slight uptick the week of March 30, both the number of new deals created and deals marked as closed in HubSpot CRM declined the week of April 6, particularly in EMEA and LATAM. The Easter holiday contributed in part to a weekend dip in deal volume across all regions, but deal creation was already declining before the holiday. As a leading indicator of future revenue, continued declines in deal creation here do not bode well 8 weeks of spiritual resilience with dan tyre for April and Q2 sales results. We will be watching this metric closely.

Sales teams are sending about 50% more email to prospects than they were pre-COVID, but responses continue to fall. Last week, sales response rates hit an all-time low for 2020 at 2.1%, a lower response rate than Christmas week 2019.

Like last week, those in marketing are having more success. Customers still seem willing to engage with marketing materials, as open rates are up another 8% this week. Marketing email volume has begun to level off week-over-week, but total email sent volume is still much higher than pre-COVID levels.

Buyer-initiated chat and database growth

 

Suggest interested customers are still out there. Chat volume, despite declining last week, is still well above pre-COVID averages. Database growth currently sits at February levels; while the aggressive growth of the past few weeks has slowed, it’s encouraging to see the metric still holding steady with historical averages for now.

Surprisingly, businesses of all sizes were hit almost equally. Our data facebook users showed that buyers demonstrated neither a preference for supporting small businesses, nor a desire to buy from more established and stable companies.

How metrics changed in March

The number of deals created continues to decline, particularly in EMEA and LATAM.

After a slight end-of-quarter rebound the week of March 30, the number of deals created fell 11% the week of April 6.

Deals created are down across all regions. North America saw the smallest decline (down 3% in the week of April 6). EMEA and LATAM had the biggest Sales volume drop at 19% and 16%, but it’s worth noting that business closures for Easter may have contributed to the drop in these regions.

Closed deals also fell 19%, though we expect to see this happen between a quarter-ending week and the first week of a new quarter. Some of this decline may come from the 15% drop in deals created the week of March 23, but most of that Sales volume impact will likely be felt in the coming weeks, so expect this number to continue to change. We’ll be watching it closely.

The week of April 6 saw the lowest weekly volume of closed deals this year.

Shoppers continue to interact with businesses online.

Buyer-initiated chat volume was down slightly, but still around 10% higher than pre-COVID levels – conversational marketing remains valuable for businesses. Database growth has slowed, but also hasn’t fallen below February averages.

Other online metrics looked healthy, too. Monthly website traffic was up 13% in March, compared to February.

 

The average number of contacts added to portals fell 19% last week, after a 36% decline the week of March 30. These seem like big drops, but the weekly average number of contacts remains at the same level as the weekly averages for February. Please continue to watch this metric closely.

 

The number of customer-initiated conversations fell 4.5% the week of April 6, after growing steadily throughout March. This drop did not erase March’s gains, as last week’s numbers are still well above pre-COVID levels.

 

Engagement with marketing emails continued to increase and responses to sales outreach hit new lows.

Marketing email open rates increased as volume remained stable.

Marketing email volume has remained stable over the past three weeks, growing by less than half a percent over the past two weeks. That said, overall volume for the week of April 6 is still higher than pre-COVID levels by about 20%.

Open rates on these emails continue to grow. April 6 saw a 25.5% open rate, the highest single-week average of 2020, and an 8% increase over the previous week.

 

Sales email volume fell for the first time in eight weeks as response rates hit an all-time low.

Outreach dropped by almost 4% last week, the first time this number has dropped since February 17, but the total volume of emails sent is still around 50% higher than pre-COVID levels.

This prospecting continues to be ineffective. The response rate hit 2.1% last week, which is a 10% lower response rate than the week of Christmas in 2019. This is the lowest weekly response rate of 2020 so far, and 40% lower than the highest response rate of the year (3.51% the week of January 6).

 

What this means for businesses

Targeted prospecting is more important than ever.

This week’s headline is the 11% drop in new deal creation, while sales connection attempts remain much higher than pre-COVID levels. Some increase in email prospecting is expected as outside sales teams have transitioned inward, but this does not fully explain the acceleration in sales contact growth. Instead, the data suggests that many sales teams have reacted to the economic climate by reaching out to a significantly broader base of potential customers than they would normally target.

Not only is this ineffective – response rates hit their lowest levels in 2020 last week – it is also a foreboding sign for longer-term sales forecasts. As deal creation is the best indicator of future revenue, course correction needs to be made quickly. Many companies will need to rethink how to improve prospecting to bolster their pipeline for the long term.