Most sellers and sales leaders often ask themselves: "Is my win rate any good?"
Win rate is one of the most basic measures of your sales success, so it’s only natural to want to benchmark your performance against the average to see how you stack up.
The answer to this question isn’t so straightforward, however. Before we dig in, we need nail down what “win rate” actually means.
Here’s how we define sales win rate: The percent of opportunities proposed or quoted that the organization won.
This definition is important because it’s based on opportunities that make it to the proposal stage—not all opportunities that enter your pipeline.
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%.
Win/Loss Rates Across All Respondents
It’s worthwhile to note that though there were slight variations among industries and company sizes, their win rates were similar. Our findings are applicable to organizations of all sizes.
We broke respondents down into 3 groups based on their sales results: Elite Performers (representing the top 7% of respondents), Top Performers (representing the top 20%), and The Rest (representing the remaining 80%). When we look at win rate by each performance group, the differences are surprisingly large.
Top Performance and Win Rate
Elite Performers win nearly three-quarters of their opportunities. The Rest only win 40%—and this group represents 80% of all respondents.
This large gap in win rate between performance groups represents a huge opportunity for companies willing to invest in becoming Elite and Top Performers.
You might think that moving from a 40% win rate to 62% doesn’t sound like much. But simple math reveals just how big a difference even incremental improvements in win rate can make for a business.
Assume a company has the following:
- # of sellers: 200
- # of proposals/year/seller: 25
- Average size of sale: $150,000
Look at the difference in revenue by win rate:
The Win Rate Difference
At a win rate of 40%, this organization’s annual revenue is $300 million. At 62%, it’s $465 million.
That’s 55% growth for the whole company without adding any sales headcount—just by increasing the win rate.
Now it’s time to plug in your own numbers and do the math. What difference can increasing your win rate make for you and your organization?
