Understand your discrete win rates to understand your sales efforts

Don’t be fooled by your average win rates.

‍

They can be completely misleading. 

‍

Instead, analyze the win rates that align with your strategic priorities.

‍

I worked with a CEO who was trying to move upmarket from SMB to the enterprise.

‍

He bragged about his team’s high average win rate. 42% he claimed.

‍

Except, on the deals that were most important to him, it really wasn’t close to that.

‍

He had been fooled by a high win rate on his low-priced transactional product for SMBs that weren’t strategic for him. 

‍

He looked at his average win rate across all segments and products and thought “Hey, we’re on the right track.”

‍

Except the opposite was true.

‍

Their win rate on the enterprise deals that he thought would drive future growth was just 18%. 

‍

When we broke his win rates down for him, he could see he wasn’t close to being on track to achieve his strategic objectives.

‍

You gotta dig deeper into the data.

‍

If you don’t understand your discrete win rates, you don’t understand your sales efforts.

‍

Do you want to sell bigger deals to the enterprise? What’s your win rate on those?

‍

Do you want to increase your market share in a key vertical? What’s your win rate on those deals?

‍

Do you want to sell your entire platform instead of single modules? What’s your win rate on those platform opportunities?

‍

What are your win rates on the initiatives that are most important to you?

‍

Of course, your win rates will reflect your learning curve as you embark on new sales initiatives.

‍

However, as a leader, that is the level of detail you need to track in order to build an effective plan for effectively hiring, enabling and coaching your sellers that aligns with achieving your core strategic objectives.