Declining win rates are a serious problem in B2B sales. In fact, declining win rates are probably the biggest hurdle to accelerating growth. Here’s why. It doesn’t really matter how much money you spend at the top of the funnel. It doesn’t really matter how many more people you hire, how many more marketing activities you do, or how much you spend on advertising. To some extent, all of those things are subject to how well you can convert. They are all subject to how well you currently win business. So if your win rates are declining, your return on investment in anything you’re doing at the top of the funnel is also declining. That’s why win rate is something sales leaders and company leaders need to hyper-focus on improving.
And the thing about declining win rates is that it has nothing to do with the amount of information out there or the amount of tools and technology our sales teams have. In fact, there are more tools and technology involved in the sales process than ever before. So what’s really going on with declining win rates? Because this has been going on for years. You’ll see all kinds of industry data showing that sales teams are not hitting quota, and that sales teams are performing at rates that continue to go down. So what’s going on here? How can we actually fix declining win rates?
There are a couple of tips we have to put an end to declining win rates and ultimately start achieving extremely high win rates. At RevUp Sales, with our clients, we strive to achieve 40 and 50 percent win rates, which for some of you may be unheard of. But it is possible if you do these three things.
The first thing is you have to truly understand the difference between driving efficiency with your sales team and driving effectiveness. Here’s an example. We have all kinds of AI tools. We have agents that will automate a lot of tasks for us. That is efficiency. That is removing manual work that used to be done and replacing it with automation. And that’s great. But just because your team is efficient does not mean they are more effective. Giving the team more time doesn’t immediately make them more effective if they weren’t using their time properly to begin with. So the first thing in improving win rates is to separate efficiency from effectiveness.
Now, the second thing is: how do I actually drive effectiveness? Because in order to stop declining win rates, I need to make my team more effective. And that is entirely within the control of sales leaders: how they train their team, make them better, and make them better stewards of their customer. To make your team more effective, they need to control the sales process. They need to be the expert for their customer. And for them to be the expert for their customer, you need to rethink your entire sales approach. Your sales team, as the expert for the customer, needs to put your product and service to the side. That needs to come second to training your team to be change agents with their prospects. First and foremost, your sales team needs to design their approach in a way that helps them understand what is going on in the prospect’s current environment: why the prospect should change, why they can’t do that with what they have today, and why they need to do it now. So in terms of your team’s effectiveness, you have to rethink what we really mean by effectiveness. And that’s where AI may not be the answer. You may just need good old-fashioned training, reinforcement and performance development.
And the last thing you can do to stop declining win rates is to really take ownership of what’s going on in the deal. That’s where you need a true deal management framework that eliminates assumptions, eliminates gut feel, and speaks to facts. Do we have this? Do we not have this? If we don’t have it, and we know it’s critical to the sale moving forward, how do we get it? We’ve got to remove assumptions. We’ve got to remove gut feel from deal management if you want to turn around your declining win rates and actually increase them.
