Average win rates mask the real story
Hi Friends,
Welcome to Win Rate Wednesday!
In this issue:
[This Week on The Win Rate Podcast]
Keith Peiris, Co-Founder and CEO of Tome
Listen to the full episode: Can Sellers Cut Through The Noise of Automation?
[Today’s Win Rate Lesson]
Forget average win rates.
What’s the median win rate of your sales team?
The average win rate for a sales team masks the real story of your sales performance.
And not in a good way.
Let’s say you manage a 20 person sales team that has an average win rate of 20%.
Objectively, a 20% average win rate is pretty mediocre.
It indicates some significant underlying sales performance issues.
But your sales problems actually are far worse than your average win rate portrays.
Because, if you want to really understand the scope of your sales performance challenges you have to answer this question:
What’s the median win rate on your sales team?
Assuming a normal distribution of performance across that 20 person sales team (with a few top performers, a bunch of average sellers and then all the others) your median win rate is likely going to be somewhere around 12-13%.
Which means that 50% of the sellers on your 20 person sales team have individual win rates of 12-13% and lower.
Fully half of your sellers, 50%, are so poorly trained and inadequately coached that they are barely able to win just 1 out of every 8 of their most qualified opportunities.
So, yeah, you can twist yourself into a pretzel trying to justify low win rates in the 16-20% range. (You know who you are.)
But, guess what?
As bad as 16%-20% average win rates are, the situation is far worse than that.
领英推荐
What’s your median win rate?
And what are you doing to fix it?
Added Note: Effectiveness vs Efficiency
There’s been a lot of chatter about making sales more efficient in 2025.
Most of it along the lines of ‘Let’s use AI to free up all the hours sellers spend on routine or bureaucratic tasks and give them more selling time.’
Which kind of misses the key point.
Which is that giving a sales person more selling time doesn’t make them more effective (or more productive.)
Give a 20% win rate seller another hour per day of selling time and they’ll still be a 20% win rate seller.
On the other hand, if you coach a 20% win rate seller to become a 30% win rate seller and then give them an extra hour of selling time, you’ll see really good things happens.
Focus on increasing sales effectiveness first before worrying about efficiency.
Efficient but ineffective selling is still inefficient.
Invest in helping a seller become better at their job before giving them more selling time.
Effectiveness first. Efficiency after.
[Three Ways I Can Help]
Master the 4 core human competencies that dictate your success in sales: Connection, Curiosity, Understanding and Generosity and become the seller you want to be.
Unless you’re winning more than 50% of your qualified opportunities your win rate is unacceptably low. Let's change that.
Most salespeople have all the training they need. Often what they need to achieve at higher levels is a fresh perspective, and a new framework, to effectively put their skills to use for their buyers. I’ve helped sellers and teams around the world do this. Let me help you.
Good selling,
Andy
Founder at Katsu, Co-founder at Trifecta
4 周Such a great point about efficiency - it pains me when folks try to make something more efficient but the process isn't working in the first place ??