Boost Your Sales Team's Performance: Strategies to Improve Win Rates and Drive Sales

Are you struggling to get your sales team to hit their quotas? Understanding win rates might be the key to unlocking better performance.

If you are a sales leader or sales manager, your team’s results look like a bell curve. Let’s presume that you have ten salespeople.

If you are a sales leader or sales manager, your team’s results looks like a bell curve. Let’s presume that you have ten salespeople.

How to Improve the Performance of Average Salespeople

The peak of your bell curve is made up a number between 4 - 6. Their in rates are average. If the average win rate 25%, these salespeople will have win rates between 20-30%. It is difficult to reach your sales goals with these anemic win rates. You will need to develop these salespeople, increasing their win rates. This is the most important initiative you should pursue, as it will improve your results.

Maximizing Success of Your High-Performing Sales Reps

Two or three members of your sales force have exceedingly high win rates, something above 70%. Some of this due to their trait and skills, but they also have enough experience in your industry to have mastered the sales conversations their client needs. For some reason, you rarely see more than two or three high performers on a sales team. If you do, I’d like to know how you were able to get more than three over 70%. I am blessed to have four sales reps that win at 85%, they have decades of experience, as well as being experts.

Identifying and Coaching Low-Performing Sales Team Members

This is the bottom 20% - 30%. This is two or three salespeople who are almost certain to have under 20% win rates. One or two of them may not belong in B2B Sales at all. You may also have a new, young salesperson who has the talent to be able to move the stacked ranking.

At a sales kickoff meeting, I watched a senior sales leader argue with the CFO about a slide that showed each sales reps win rates. The CFO believed that this ranking would discourage the salespeople at the bottom of the long list. The senior sales leader laughed and explained no one was surprised, as the win rates were already on their dashboard. This sales leader was correct to focus on win rates.

Common Mistakes Sales Leaders Make in Managing Win Rates

You are not going to like what I must share with you, but if you can have an open mind, you may find a way to improve your team’s results.

The Problem with Over-Prioritizing Sales Pipeline Coverage

For quite a long time, we have prioritized coverage, believing that having more opportunities will allow the salesperson to reach their sales goals. For many years now, we have watched quota attainment plummet, with less than half of salespeople reaching their quota.

Using the false logic that more opportunities automatically improves a sales by having more opportunities to pursue. This is the logic of a person who buys lottery ticket, hoping that they win, and when lose, they hope the next ticket is a winner.

If more opportunities is the way to reach your sales goals, you would have already have reached your quota. I would counsel you to have some coverage, but not so much that your sales team is bogged down by more prospecting than you need. You need them winning deals, not adding more opportunities they will not have to pursue.

Why Sales Effectiveness Should Be Your Main Focus

If you were to find a balance between enough opportunities, ones that have legs, and focusing on sales effectiveness, the incredible increase of effectiveness would move you and your team much closer to your sales targets. To do the work here, you will need a development plan, B2B Sales training, and coaching. These initiatives are critical to your ability to improve your win rates.

The Importance of Measuring Incremental Win Rate Improvements

A sales manager answered my question of the win rate of each or her ten sales reps, without any crutch, she was able to list them from highest win rate to lowest, explaining number ten was in his second week. What this excellent sales manager was not doing was measuring the increase of each person on her team. But who could criticize not measuring, as this is the first time you have considered the idea of measuring the increase of each salesperson.

How to Effectively Increase Sales Win Rates Across Your Team

Let us start with the average salesperson. If you were able to have the 4-6 average win rate from 20% to 30% to 30% to 40%, this increase in your win rates would improve your quota attainment.

Let’s look next at the high performers, even though they are carrying the heaviest load, you may be able to improve a little, but for my money. I would give my high performers the largest prospective clients, as their win rates suggest that they should be prioritizing these opportunities.

The last group is the low performers. These sales reps will need a lot more help to inch up their win rates. One way to help them to improve is have them join the other two groups, so they can observe and model salespeople who have figured out to win deals.

Do Good Work, and I will see you back here on Monday!