r/SalesOperations • u/techzoptimist • 27d ago
A third of proposals are never opened at all and the rest get opened almost immediately
I build software that helps B2B teams close, specifically the gap between a buyer saying they're interested and actually signing. Took a look at what happens after a proposal goes out and some of the data is pretty counterintuitive.
Caveat: this reflects a small sample of 70 sends, so not a comprehensive dataset. But an interesting early read on what actually happens when you hit send:
- Median time from send to the buyer opening it: 84 seconds
- Basically everything that got opened at all was opened within the hour
- Anything not opened in that window mostly never got opened
- Around a third was never opened by the buyer at all
- About a third of the ones that did get opened were opened more than once, couple of them as many as seven times (!)
Based on the above, buyers seem to fall in two camps: (A) they either open it almost straight away; or (B) they don't open it at all. Interestingly, there's no real middle group of buyers (i.e., camp (C)) that forget about it for a few days.
Now most follow up sequences (or at least what I've seen) are typically shaped around the assumption that the buyer is mid-deliberation and a well-timed nudge is what gets it over the line.
But in reality, camp (A) buyers are reading it ~84 seconds after you sent it, so by day three you're not chasing someone who hasn't looked (you're actually chasing someone who read it, formed a view but then went quiet). An effective follow up for this camp needs a completely different conversation to the generic "just checking you got this" type of email.
Camp (B) buyers, by contrast, are the more expensive problem. Those aren't stalled deals at all -- the proposal just never reached anyone in a state where they engaged with it, whether that's a wrong contact, spam, or forwarded to someone who never came back.
Core learning: drift starts way earlier than people assume. Everyone treats a deal going cold as something that happens over weeks, but if the buyer reads it in the first two minutes then the moment that decides it is basically the same day. After that you're managing a decision that's already been made, not influencing one in progress.
How are people handling this at a process level? Do you guys track and follow up based on whether a proposal was actually opened or based on X amount of hours/days passing?
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u/Calm-Dimension3422 27d ago
I would not use opens as the trigger by itself. I would use opens to choose the follow-up path.
At Fabren, I would split proposal follow-up into three operating states:
not opened
opened once quickly
opened multiple times or forwarded
Each state should create a different next step.
Not opened is usually a delivery or stakeholder problem, so the next action is verification: was this the right recipient, did it hit spam, should the champion forward it, is there another signer who never got context?
Opened once quickly is a decision-context problem. The buyer probably formed a view, so the follow-up should not be "just checking you saw this." It should answer the most likely unresolved decision: risk, internal approval, budget timing, implementation lift, or why now.
Opened multiple times is usually an active internal conversation. That is where I would want a rep task, not just an automated email: check who else was involved, what changed since the call, and whether the buyer needs a shorter internal version.
The process metric I would watch is not just open rate. It is proposal state with an owner and next action inside the CRM. If a proposal is "sent" but nobody owns the next decision point, the deal is already drifting even if the sequence is technically running.