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Everything You Wanted To Know to Increase Deal Win Rates

How do you increase deal win rates?

Who cares about your deal win rates?

Your CRO.

Your CEO.

Your Head of Sales.

And anyone else paying attention to business performance.

Before we go far, let’s quickly review the basics.

What is a deal?

A deal, or opportunity, represents a potential sale between a company and a prospect.

Why do deals close?

Deals close when the prospect decides to either buy, not buy, or walk away from the conversation or proposal.

Closed Won Meaning

A closed-won deal means the prospect agreed to your proposal and purchased your solution.

Closed Lost Meaning

A closed-lost deal means the prospect rejected your proposal and chose not to purchase your solution.

Closed to No-Decision Meaning

When a deal is closed to no decision, it most often means that a prospect stopped responding to outreach from the seller.

 

What is the sales win rate?

Let’s keep this VERY simple.

((# of Opportunities Won) / (# of Opportunities Worked)) * 100

Divide the number of opportunities won by the number of opportunities worked overall to get the win rate.

If you want to determine your rate, use our win percentage calculator below.

What is a good sales win rate?

To answer this question, let’s begin by answering a different question.

What is the average sales win rate?

The most often quoted answer to this question is 47%.

This number comes from research performed by the Rain Group, where they noted:

To provide sales organizations and individuals with a benchmark for win rate and other metrics, the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research surveyed 472 sellers and sales executives representing companies with salesforces ranging in size from 10 sellers to 5,000+. Among other things, we wanted to know: what is the average sales win rate, and how do win rates vary based on overall performance?

Across all respondents, the average win rate is 47%.

The first question to consider is how does your current win rate compare to this theoretical average?

A better question, perhaps, is this.

How does your current win rate compare to other businesses in your same market?

While this is a better question, the best question to answer is this one.

How does your win rate for the last four quarters compared to your win rate in the previous four quarters?

You will have a degree of inconsistency, but, as you look at this, are you generally improving, staying the same, or getting worse?

If you have reached a plateau or getting worse and are running worse than your competition and worse than 47%, you have a problem that Enablement can help solve.

How can Enablement Influence Sales Win Rates?

The formula above is simple, which means how Enablement can influence the metric is simple (at a high level).

What does Enablement do today?

The majority of Enablement teams today focus purely on how to arm sellers to move deals effectively and efficiently through the pipeline.

They deliver training and coaching, create and curate content, and focus on optimizing what the existing sales pipeline.

That’s great — but not enough.

Quick digression, what is a sales pipeline

Quoting Pipedrive:

A sales pipeline is an organized, visual way of tracking multiple potential buyers as they progress through different stages in the purchasing process.

Your sales pipeline is your map of the journey buyers and sellers take together.

What should Enablement teams do to optimize the sales pipeline

First, this is not a single team job.

Enablement and Operations, working in collaboration with sales leadership, marketing, and potentially other groups, must do this hard work together.

As these groups analyze the sales pipeline, collaboratively, consider:

  • Is it well-aligned to how buyers want to buy or are you adding unnecessary friction?
  • Does your sales pipeline account for the various types of buyers, additional members of complex buying committees, and other variations your business encounters?

Remember.

Customer experience is one of the leading drivers of the buying process, make it easy and enjoyable to work with you.

Moving beyond analysis

Get your hands dirty

Use a win/loss analysis process to understand why you win and why you lose.

These conversations should be had with every single person in your business who was involved with the deal.

Ideally, you also involved the prospect if possible.

Give them time to sell

Your average seller, yes, back to averages, only spend 1/3 of their time selling.

The rest of their time is spent on administrative tasks (e.g., CRM), emails, creating custom decks, searching for content, and countless other reasons.

Two questions for you to consider.

  • How much time are YOUR sales reps spending selling?
  • What is preventing them from spending more time with prospects and customers?

Listen, learn, and remove obstacles preventing them from selling.

Looking at the opportunity universe.

Enablement teams take a broad view of the buyer and customer journey, giving them access to influence this number.

Why does this matter?

If you are able to help your team work with a smaller number of highly qualified deals, versus a large number of less qualified deals, your win rates will go through the roof.

How can you influence this metric?

Your SDR Team

Depending on your organization, the following may be great questions to also ask marketing.

  • How are leads obtained and qualified? Review all lead sources.
  • How is lead outreach managed and prioritized?
  • What messaging is being used and who crafts it? Call scripts, emails, social outreach, are often poorly managed and lead to inconsistent or horrible outcomes.

Your Customer Success Team

We all know, it is easier to sell to existing customers than new buyers.  How can you support this team to:

  • Make every customer successful.
  • Successful customers renew and buy more.   How can you train your Customer Success team to fully understand the problems your other solutions can solve for customers and, as a trusted advisor, to offer them up to existing customers when the time is right?
  • Successful customers refer others.  How do you make it easy for your Customer Success team to ask for referrals?
  • Successful customers give testimonials.  You get it — there are a lot of ways successful customers may be willing to partner with you.
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Did the win percentage calculator, along with these tips, help you improve the deal win rates for your business?

Related Content and Ideas

Read our in-depth article on all business metrics.

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