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Myth Busting

Myth: "80% of sales are made on the 5th to 12th contact" — the follow-up stat nobody can produce

The claim:
80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact, so most reps give up just before the sale.
Unsourced

If you've sat through a sales training day, scrolled LinkedIn or read a CRM vendor's blog, you've probably met this one. It usually comes as a neat staircase: 2% of sales on the first contact, 3% on the second, 5% on the third, 10% on the fourth, and 80% somewhere between the fifth and twelfth. The moral is always the same: keep going, because your competitors quit just before the money. It's a motivating story, and plenty of good people pass it on in good faith. But if the number is wrong, teams end up designing follow-up cadences, targets and even hiring plans around a figure nobody can show you.

Where the claim comes from

The statistic is almost always credited to the "National Sales Executive Association", sometimes shortened to NSEA. Occasionally it turns up with no source at all, or credited to whichever blog the writer found it on. The newer variant, "80% of sales need five or more follow-ups", looks like the same number reworded. The original staircase counts contacts or calls, not follow-ups after a first touch, so the wording has shifted as it's been passed along.

People have been questioning it for over a decade. In 2012 the marketer Mike Blaney wrote that he'd searched for half an hour and couldn't find the study or the organisation. He noted it was quoted on hundreds of websites as though people had read it. In 2014 VentureBeat's Stewart Rogers went further. He concluded the stats were made up and said he'd found no trace of an organisation by that name in the searches and registries he tried.

What we could actually find

The trail doesn't stop at "it doesn't exist". Sales & Marketing Executives International (SMEI) is a real professional body, founded in 1935. In a 2021 post on its own site, SMEI says the figures came from its own history. By SMEI's account, in 1942 the Long Island, New York chapter of "NSEA (now SMEI)" surveyed its members on the ratio of calls made to sales made. SMEI says the sample was fewer than 40. The same post warns readers to check sales statistics before sharing them, and to ask about sample size and how recent the data is.

That's the best lead anyone has turned up, and it comes from the organisation itself. So we don't think it's fair to say the number was simply invented. There are still real gaps, though.

So here's our verdict. The claim has a plausible origin story from a credible body, but we can't produce the primary source, and neither could anyone else we found. Even on SMEI's own description, it would be a survey of fewer than 40 people from more than 80 years ago. That can't carry the weight modern sales advice puts on it. We've marked it Unsourced, meaning we couldn't trace it to evidence we could check. Nobody lied on purpose. The statistic has just been copied so often that the copying looks like proof.

What the evidence does support

The general idea behind the myth, that one attempt is rarely enough, does have better support. The best-known dataset is Velocify's Ultimate Contact Strategy study. It looked at nearly 3.5 million leads from more than 400 of the company's clients, all generated in the first half of 2012. It found that 93% of leads that eventually converted had been reached by the sixth call attempt. It also found that more than half of converting prospects were first reached after the first call attempt.

That's useful, but read it for what it is. It's a vendor's analysis of its own customers' inbound leads, meaning people who had already enquired. It measures how many calls it took to reach someone, not how many contacts it took to close a sale. It also points to diminishing returns after about six calls, which doesn't fit neatly with "80% need five to twelve". It supports persistence up to a point. It doesn't confirm the staircase.

What to do instead

You don't need a made-up percentage to justify following up. Here's what we'd suggest.

If you do quote a number in training or in a pitch, quote one you can link to, and say what it measured.

Sources we checked

Spotted a mistake or a number we can't back up? Tell us and we'll fix it.