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Get free accessAs your start planning for the coming year, optimizing your sales win rate is probably a top priority. To gain a deeper understanding of how to improve it, let’s first take a look at how to define it, calculate it, and why it’s important.
How to Define Your Sales Win Rate
As our partners at Richpanel share, “Win rate is not just a sales team’s metric. it’s a measure of the effectiveness of the entire buying journey,” says Shri Mithran, Richpanel’s VP of Marketing.
“Marketers can use it to figure out how to enable the reps better, understand the most common objection raised, and figure out ways to proactively address it on the website. Product managers can use it to get a feel of which capabilities resonate most and which the least.“
How is sales win rate calculated?
Calculating your sales win rate is easy if you’re connected to the right sales tools, but if you haven’t made the investment yet, simply divide the number of closed-won deals by the total number of deals you have in your pipeline.
Why You Should Prioritize Your Sales Win Rate
Sales win rate is only one metric, but it gives you important information about the quality of your sales process and where you need to improve.
If you consistently have a low sales win rate, it might be worth looking at your current team and how to bridge the skill gap with training and other learning resources. It also might come down to updating your pitch, making tweaks to your email communications, or taking a closer look at your buyer’s journey.
Prioritizing your sales win rate gives you a clearer picture of team performance and how to improve it. So now, let’s turn to our partners (plus an Aircall team member) to share tried-and-tested strategies to improve your sales rate and drive results.
6 Ways to Improve Your Sales Win Rate
1. Build Great Relationships
It should come as no surprise that one of the best ways to increase your sales team win rate is to build positive relationships with prospects and customers alike.
Tom Lavery, CEO and Founder of Jiminny, highlights the importance of prioritizing relationship-building in a modern sales environment.
“It’s not just about how you can help the company and what problems you can solve, it’s about the partnership that you build. That means building that relationship from the first interaction—whether that’s with a BDR before an AE, then someone in onboarding, then CS through to chatting with support—that whole experience should be about having great relationships with customers so you can drive the best result.” — Tom Lavery, CEO and Founder of Jiminny
2. Proactively Include Cross-Functional Team Members
On that note, our partners at Copper see the most success by collaborating with other team members early and often to close more deals faster.
“Use your cross-functional teams before closing a deal. If a prospect is hesitant to move forward because of onboarding or support concerns, bring in the onboarding manager they’ll be working with. This way, they know what to expect once they sign the contract and feel more confident becoming a customer.”
— Colin Nee, Head of Sales at Copper
3. Offer Ongoing Mentorship and Training
Without a detailed onboarding and training process, your sales reps won’t be set up for success.
For Marc Gassó, CMO at Bloobirds, prioritizing education at the start (and providing ongoing resources) is key to building a sales team that drives results.
“Sales reps still need a lot of training and ongoing assistance. With the rise of sales technology, we’ve given more tools to sales professionals, but most of them focus only on increasing their productivity. Sales reps must be—or at least sound like—experts in the product or service they’re selling to earn the buyer’s trust, and in some industries, that takes a lot of time. Providing the best onboarding, ongoing training, and resources to constantly assist sales reps is essential to increasing our win rates and meeting our goals.”
— Marc Gassó, CMO at Bloobirds
4. Offer Collaborative Training Opportunities
When it comes to training, Richpanel takes it a step further to make it more collaborative and engaging.
“Collaborative training drastically improves the takeaways for a salesperson and the entire GTM org. At Richpanel, we have a cadence of collaborative training every Monday, reviewing a sales call from the previous week. The salesperson is put on a hot seat here, and this exercise aims to rate the salesperson’s performance on the call on six different parameters. The exciting part of this exercise is that this is not just carried out by the sales managers. Product managers, marketers, and implementation engineers form the council that does these reviews.”
— Shri Mithran, VP of Marketing, Richpanel
From there, they judge sales calls on the following criteria:
Rapport Building: How well did the salesperson establish a connection with the customer?
Discovery: How well was the discovery made? Did we understand the customer’s motivations, pains, and status quo to its full potential?
Pitch Quality/Storytelling: Did the salesperson internalize the discovery, and did they manage to convey the product’s value prop in a way that sticks?
Objection Handling: Did we put the customer at ease with all the objections raised?
Listen Rate: Best sales reps also happen to be the best listeners. Did we create room and let the customer speak as much as they could?
Closing: Did we zero in on the next steps, and is the customer clear about the expectations from both ends?
5. Use Chat to Your Advantage
For Mia Bobak, Tech Partner Manager at Gorgias, increasing your win rate comes down to leveraging omnichannel communication—specifically in relation to chat—to create a more personalized experience.
“Chat campaigns are a great way to engage prospective customers and build trust early on. You can have them trigger during different time intervals or on different product pages. For example, if you’re a makeup brand, you can have a chat pop-up that says, ‘Hey, do you need help finding the right foundation shade? I’m here to help!’ By proactively engaging the prospect to have a conversation with your team, you’re driving them to make a purchase and providing an exceptional, personalized experience at the same time.”
— Mia Bobak, Tech Partner Manager at Gorgias
6. Nurture Leads Consistently & Streamline the Customer Journey
After talking with the partners we featured here, we turned to our own team to share their insights too. For Megan Cull, our Strategic Account Executive Team Lead, it all comes down to consistency and finding a working style that helps you reach your goals.
“If you’re not staying organized and on top of your prospects, you’re leaving money on the table. Some of my colleagues prefer to keep their day completely wide open and schedule meetings & demos on an ad-hoc basis, but I like to handle all of my follow-ups and admin tasks at the same time to be as productive as possible. Once you find the structure that works best for you, create a process to keep track of deals and prospects, so none of them slip through the cracks. This is often defined and fine-tuned with a strong Sales Operations team that will help you take advantage of your CRM. It’s imperative to keep touch points that are meaningful for your clients and constantly switch up the types of emails and calls you send out.”
— Megan Cull, Strategic Account Executive, Team Lead at Aircall
Want to keep learning? Check out our latest sales resources and tips:
Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Sales Motivation Factors & How to Ignite Them with Gamification
The Key to Scaling Your Sales Team? Focus on Professional Development
Ready to set your sales team up for success? Test-drive Aircall for yourself to see how our industry-leading cloud-based phone system helps your team close more deals.
Published on October 17, 2022.
