If you missed Venture Beat’s post the other day on these stats you’ll want to go check it out, cause it appears we’ve ALL been duped.

I’ve seen these numbers so many times I, like most people, have come to accept them as fact. Haven’t you? Although I don’t believe I’ve blogged about these numbers, I know I have verbally tossed them about with peers and customers.  Now that it appears they are fake, I’m a bit embarrassed.

I tried looking for similar stats to see if someone else or another company had done a similar study that was close to or similar and I couldn’t find anything. I also wanted to make sure  Stewart Rogers, over at Venture Beat, wasn’t putting one over on us. I couldn’t and he’s not. I couldn’t find these stats attached to a real company or similar stats by anyone else. Which bothers me, because I can recall seeing a bar graph a while back that had similar numbers but not exact and for the life of me I can’t find it.

Needless to say, this is a devastating blow to the sales training and consulting world. No, it’s not going to change much, but it does leave a big hole that many felt was filled. That hole is our understanding of what it takes to connect with a prospect to make a sale.

This information has been used to support cold calling scripts and cadences. It’s been used to promote content marketing. It’s been used to justify inside vs outside sales. It’s been used as a critical piece of data in a myriad of corporate sales organization’s decisions and now it appears the data is baseless.

Stewart does a good job of breaking down how long it appears this info has been out there, how ubiquitous it is and how unfortunate it is that few people actually checked its authenticity.  So, I’m not going to pile on. I will say, it should leave us all thinking hmmm? What now, is cold calling really dead? Are the numbers worse than we hear? Are they better? Should we be doing something else now? How many contacts does it take to make the sale?

Maybe the owl can help us?

How many contacts does it take to get to the sale? Now that we’ve been duped, the world may never know.

Looks like someone has a chance to do a study that will move like wildfire. Just sayin’!