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⚡️ Today’s level up ⚡️
The key metric sellers need to be focused on the most (but a lot aren’t even aware of) is win rate. In today’s edition, I break down exactly what it is, why it’s so important, and provide a spreadsheet you can steal to better monitor your personal sales stats.
Let’s go!
Read time: <5 minutes
What exactly is win rate?
Something I talk about often with my former sales coach, Andy Paul, is that win rate is the mother of all sales metrics.
Yet, most teams rarely measure it, and a lot of individuals don’t even know theirs.
Do you?
It’s a shame, because win rate is a key indicator that what you’re doing is working (or not working). It’s certainly way more helpful than the activity-based metrics (like meetings ran, proposals sent, etc) that I see a lot of SaaS companies obsess over.
So let’s get clear on what a true win rate is for a seller working on complex enterprise or strategic deals, because I know there is a lot of debate out there on exactly how to measure it.
Here’s how I define it:
Win rate is the percentage of deals you win based on both sides mutually agreeing to an exploration to pursue business together.
This means when an SDR books a discovery call, and you eventually move it to Closed/Lost because nothing meaningful materializes (i.e. both sides get busy and lose interest), that does not affect your win rate. That is a sign of early stage deal progression dysfunction vs a reflection on your ability to win business.
However, if you get to the later stage of a deal, like both agreeing to review a proposal, and they say no, then that indeed is the prospect consciously making a decision to go in a different direction. In this scenario, yes, win rate is impacted (negatively).
Why is win rate so important?
When you properly dial into win rate, you allow yourself to deviate away from some of the common old-school sales tactics, like constantly needing 5x pipeline coverage.
This further frees you up to spend more quality time on making an impact on a smaller subset of accounts. Further scaled across a team, that means companies can be leaner with their sales force (something we’ve seen happen over the past 18 months).
Sadly, even in this new macro reality, most companies are still making the mistake of focusing on activity over impact. But you don’t have to.
The goal of The Purposeful Performer™ is to follow this path:
Insights → Intentions → Impact → Income → Independence
I focused heavily on monitoring my win rate throughout my career as an active seller, but I doubled down on obsessing on it during my most prolific portion when I was a strategic seller from 2018 – 2022.
It was absolutely vital, because I had 50 accounts on my strategic account list spread all over North America (I was focused on net new business).
That meant I had to be hyper-selective with where I spent my TEA (time + energy + attention), because 6 months working on the wrong account could mean the difference of surpassing my annual number or missing it by a wide mark.
After my first year in the strategic role (and closing my first 2 logos), I had some quality insights on what worked and what didn’t, and more importantly I learned a lot from those 2 wins (and 1 loss). It became a repeatable playbook and helped me to have a dataset and the confidence in saying no to accounts like Apple and Walmart.
Check out: Identifying The Right Accounts Can Earn You More In Less Time
A system for tracking win rate
If win rate is the mother metric, then deal size and deal length are the child metrics.
They work well as a unit.
All sellers know CRMs can be hard to get the personal data you need to make effective decisions on your business, so I created my own Personal Sales Stats Matrix.
It had 3 main sections, and within each, I measured the following:
1. The Highlights
– Start date
– Today’s date (I measured when I closed a deal and/or at the end of each quarter)
– Months in (to measure the time component)
– Total quota
– Total bookings (ARR)
– Achieved % to company quota
2. The Details
– Number of new logos acquired
– The brands I delivered
– Total opportunities won (some logos had more than 1 opportunity)
– Opportunities lost (I had given them a proposal to say yes or no to)
– Bad brands “missing out on the fun” (too bad for them!)
– Win rate
– Average deal size (measured by ARR – most important to my SaaS company)
– Average deal cycle
– Average new logos acquired annually (since I had an annual quota)
– Total Contract Value (TCV) sold
– Contracted Recurring Monthly Revenue (RMR)
– Average of new TCV added each month
– Total hours worked
– Total income earned over company lifetime
– Bookings generated per hour
– Hourly rate (personal income)
3. Yearly Breakout
– Year
– Earnings
– Hours worked
– Bookings per hour
– Personal hourly rate
– Quota
– Attainment
– Year-over-Year growth
That’s a wrap. See you next week!
🐝
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