The State of B2B Sales Productivity 2026

This is a review of published research, not a survey of our own. Every figure below names its publisher, its sample size and its fielding period where those are disclosed, and we say which sources are commercially interested.

Three findings define 2026, and the third one is the reason the first two are hard to fix.

1. Attainment is falling and ramp is lengthening

Forty-eight per cent of account executives achieved annual quota, down from 51 per cent in 2024. The distribution has shifted as well as the average: fewer companies sit in the 50 to 90 per cent band, more sit in the 0 to 30 per cent band. That is 158 companies, surveyed in the first half of 2026.

Sixty per cent of SDRs hit quota in the 2025 edition, the lowest reported in that study's history and trending down since 2018, across 351 companies.

Ramp moved in the opposite direction for the two roles. Account executive ramp to full productivity now averages 6.2 months, the highest in the study's history. SDR ramp averages 3.0 months, the lowest since 2010, down from a 3.8-month peak in 2014.

Read the account executive figures together and the diagnosis becomes clearer. Companies are requiring a full year more prior experience at hire than in 2022, and those more experienced hires are taking longer to become productive. That is not an onboarding failure. It is a signal that the deal itself has become harder to learn.

The same survey supports that directly: near-majorities reported increases in stakeholder count, sales cycle length, discounting pressure, deal slippage and required pipeline coverage against the prior year.

Median account executive quota now stands at $960,000 against median on-target earnings of $200,000, a ratio of 4.6x, up from 4.2x in 2024. Thirty-eight per cent of account executives now carry sole or blended ownership of renewal and expansion, nearly double the 2024 share.

2. The attrition number that is usually misread

Median annual SDR attrition ran at 40 per cent, with the twenty-fifth to seventy-fifth percentile spanning 21 to 57 per cent. Quoted alone, that reads as a retention crisis.

The decomposition changes the diagnosis entirely: 13 per cent involuntary, 11 per cent voluntary, 16 per cent promotions. The largest single component is the system working.

Promotions have halved from 34 per cent in 2020 while average tenure has risen to 1.9 years, the highest since the early 2010s. In a market with a difficult account executive job market and a wave of layoffs behind it, longer tenure with fewer promotions is a stalled ladder rather than a retention success, and it will appear in engagement long before it appears in attrition.

3. Buyers and sellers disagree about cycle length, and both are right

This is the finding of the year, and it resolves an argument that has been running in revenue teams for two years.

Buyer-side research covering just under 4,000 responses found the average buying cycle at 10.1 months in 2025, down from 11.3 months in 2024. Buyers evaluated more vendors, 5.6 against 5.1, while spending less time on each, 2.0 months against 2.6.

Seller-side research in the same period found near-majorities reporting that sales cycle length had increased.

The reconciliation is in the same buyer dataset. The point of first contact with sellers moved from 69 per cent of the journey to 61 per cent, roughly six to seven weeks earlier. If the prior point of first contact had held, first contact would have come at 34 weeks; it actually came at 27.

The total cycle got shorter and the seller-visible portion got longer. Sellers are not wrong about their experience and buyers are not wrong about their journey. They are measuring different intervals.

That has a direct operational consequence. Sellers are now entering conversations earlier in the buyer's process, which means more of the education, more of the requirement-setting and more of the internal consensus-building happens with a seller in the room. The seller-visible cycle lengthens, the pipeline ages, and forecast confidence falls, all while the buyer completes the purchase faster than the year before.

One caveat the buyer-side publisher discloses and which should travel with the figure: part of the drop reflects a sample shift toward shorter-cycle physical goods deals and away from longer-cycle software and services. We credit them for disclosing it and it should not be omitted when the number is quoted.

4. The buyer arrives with a shortlist already ranked

Between 94 and 95 per cent of buying groups ranked their shortlist in order of preference before contacting any seller. Where a leader existed at first contact, that leader won nearly 80 per cent of the time. Where buyers had not identified a leader, the first vendor they spoke to won 57 per cent of the time.

The prior edition, across 2,509 buyers, found 81 per cent had chosen a preferred vendor before speaking to sales, 69 per cent of the process happening before seller engagement, and 85 per cent establishing purchase requirements before contact.

This is vendor-sponsored research from a company that sells software designed to detect buyers during the anonymous phase, so the finding aligns with its commercial interest. We are reporting it because the sample is large, the method is disclosed and the statistical work is unusually good for a vendor study, including regression analysis showing buying group size to be the strongest predictor of cycle length, explaining close to a quarter of the variance.

The implication for productivity is uncomfortable and worth stating plainly. If most of the ranking happens before contact, then a substantial part of seller effort is spent either confirming a decision already made in your favour, or attempting to overturn one made against you. Those are different jobs with different win rates, and almost no organisation distinguishes them in its pipeline.

5. How sellers spend the week, and why every figure is contested

The most-quoted productivity statistic in sales is the proportion of time reps spend actually selling. It should be treated with more care than it usually gets.

The largest vendor survey series has published three different figures across three editions: 28 per cent selling time in the edition fielded in 2022 across 7,775 respondents, 30 per cent in the edition fielded in 2024 across 5,500, and 40 per cent in the edition fielded August to September 2025 across 4,050. The jump from 30 to 40 per cent is large and is not explained by the publisher.

The only instrumented measurement we could locate, using a handheld time-logging device rather than recall, put selling time at 23 per cent of a 47-hour week, with reps switching activity every 16 to 17 minutes. It discloses neither its sample size nor its fielding period, its publisher sells time-study consulting, and the firm's own services page states the figure as 22 per cent rather than 23.

So: every quantitative source on how sellers spend their time is published by a company that sells software or consulting to sales organisations. There is no national statistic, no academic time study and no independent panel. Anyone quoting a precise figure is quoting a vendor.

The adjacent finding that does survive is tool overload. Forty-two per cent of reps reported being overwhelmed by too many tools in the most recent edition, down from 66 per cent in the 2022 edition.

6. Enablement, and the limits of what is known

Fifty-two per cent of reps say traditional enablement does not give them the skills they need. Forty-six per cent rarely get feedback on sales conversations. Seventy-five per cent say they are more likely to hit target with a coach or mentor. That is the most recent large vendor survey, across 4,050 respondents fielded August to September 2025.

The evidence connecting enablement investment to outcome is much thinner than the category implies. The only credible correlational dataset is from 2019, across 918 organisations: a 49.0 per cent win rate at organisations with an enablement function against 42.5 per cent without, rising to 55.1 per cent where the function is formal and charter-based.

It is confounded in the same document. Enablement adoption runs from 39.3 per cent at organisations with fewer than 25 sellers to 77.1 per cent at those with more than 500. Larger, better-resourced organisations both adopt enablement and win more. The study cannot separate them and does not claim to. It is seven years old, its publisher has published nothing since 2020, and it was distributed as a gated asset by three enablement software vendors.

On ramp specifically, no source publishes onboarding programme design against measured ramp outcome. The organisation that historically covered this space lists reducing ramp time as an enablement goal and publishes no ramp measurement at all.

7. What this means for planning

• Plan capacity on 48 per cent, not on 100 per cent. If fewer than half your reps will hit quota, coverage models built on full attainment will miss, and they will miss in the same direction every quarter.
• Set ramp expectations by deal size, not by role. The published averages diverge by role and the underlying driver is deal complexity. A 6.2-month average applied to a small-deal segment will over-hire, and applied to an enterprise segment will under-resource.
• Decompose attrition before diagnosing it. A single percentage hides the only interesting question, and in the published data the largest component is promotion.
• Track promotion rate as a leading indicator. It moved before tenure did in the published series.
• Separate confirming deals from overturning deals. If most buyers arrive with a ranked shortlist, those are two different sales with two different win rates, and almost nobody measures them apart.
• Expect the seller-visible cycle to lengthen even as buyers get faster. Plan pipeline age and forecast horizons around the seller-visible interval, and do not treat its lengthening as a performance failure.
• Do not build an enablement business case on published ROI. It does not exist. Build it on your own before-and-after measurement.

Method and honesty. This report reviews published third-party research. It is not original data. Every source named here is commercially interested to some degree, and we have said so in each case. The strongest source in this report, on ramp, quota and attrition, is a consultancy that publishes its sample size, fielding period, respondent profile and stated limitations, which is better practice than the sector norm and still not independent research. When we field our own survey we will publish the sample, the period, the questions and the segments, and we will report what is inconvenient.

This report is a review of published third-party research. It is not original survey data and we do not present it as such. It is not procurement, legal or investment advice.

References

Every figure and legal citation in this article is drawn from the sources below. Where an instrument is proposed rather than in force we say so in the text.

1. The Bridge Group, AE Models, Motions and Metrics 2026, 10th edition, n=158, online survey fielded Q1 to Q2 2026, 22 June 2026. https://www.bridgegroupinc.com/research/2026-ae-models-motions-metrics
2. The Bridge Group, SDR Models, Motions and Metrics 2025, 10th edition, n=351, fielded 2024 to 2025, 6 February 2025. https://www.bridgegroupinc.com/research/2025-sdr-models-metrics-report-the-bridge-group
3. The Bridge Group, 2026 AE compensation, quota and AI metrics, June 2026. https://blog.bridgegroupinc.com/2026-ae-compensation-quota-ai-metrics
4. 6sense, The 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, vendor-sponsored, just under 4,000 responses, November 2025. https://6sense.com/science-of-b2b/buyer-experience-report-2025/
5. 6sense, 2024 B2B Buyer Experience Report, n=2,509, vendor-sponsored, 2024. https://6sense.com/science-of-b2b/2024-buyer-experience-report/
6. Salesforce, State of Sales, 7th edition, n=4,050, fielded August to September 2025, vendor-published, 2026. https://www.salesforce.com/en-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/documents/reports/sales/salesforce-state-of-sales-report-2026.pdf
7. Salesforce, State of Sales research announcement, 5th edition, n=7,775, origin of the widely quoted selling-time figure, 8 December 2022. https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/sales-research-2023/
8. Pace Productivity, How sales reps spend their time, instrumented time study, sample size and period not disclosed, posted February 2017, modified April 2020. https://www.paceproductivity.com/single-post/2017/02/09/how-sales-reps-spend-their-time
9. CSO Insights, Miller Heiman Group, 5th Annual Sales Enablement Study, n=918, fielded May to June 2019, October 2019. https://salesenablement.pro/assets/2019/10/CSO-Insights-5th-Annual-Sales-Enablement-Study.pdf
10. Highspot, State of Sales Enablement 2025, n=350, fielded February to March 2025, vendor-published, 2025. https://www.highspot.com/state-of-sales-enablement-2025/
11. ICONIQ, The State of Go-to-Market in 2026, survey fielded January 2026, March 2026. https://www.iconiqcapital.com/growth/reports

How we work. This report was researched and written by the Sales Hub Media editorial team. We do not republish press releases. Every number and legal citation is checked against a primary source, which is named and linked above. Where an instrument is proposed rather than in force, we say so. Corrections are made openly on the report itself, never by silent edit. If you believe something here is wrong, write to info@saleshubmedia.com and tell us what and why.