How to Increase Sales Velocity and Win Ratio

Sales Velocity and Win Ratio… two seemingly jargon phrases you may hear or come across in any workplace setting. Tons of organizations throw these terms around, but fail to understand the significance and importance of what they truly measure with respect to performance. As a business owner, Sales Velocity and Win Ratio answer two important questions; how quickly and predictably can my sales team drive new business and top line Revenue growth? These are two important variables in assessing your Revenue modeling and forecasting, and also expose key factors that allow your sales organization to close more business in a quicker time frame. After all, time kills deals. 

The first step in understanding the impact these two metrics have on your predictable Revenue model is benchmarking your current “state of sales affairs”; where are these numbers at now? At a high level – Sales Velocity is a unit of time, measured in Days, Weeks, or Months depending on the nature of your industry’s life cycle. The easiest way to calculate Sales Velocity is to take the average of length of time from Opportunity Creation to Closed Won/Closed Lost. 

Win Ratio, for either a Sales Rep or Sales Organization is calculated as a percent, showcasing the number of Opportunities that are Closed Won – aka how effective your organization or reps are at converting the potential deals that are in front of them into paying customers.  

Just like anything with Sales and Business Development, there are a number of factors, both internal and external to your organization, that can negatively affect those numbers. Why is this important? Because if your Sales Velocity suffers, it will take your team a longer period of time to hit your goals. Conversely, if your Win Ratio suffers, it will take you a much higher volume of opportunities to hit your goals. Here are some of the factors that most commonly affect Sales Velocity and Win Ratio for sales organizations and teams:

Poor Economic Factors

Some things we as Sales professionals or business owners cannot control. The economy is one of those things. A great example is COVID and the economic downturn that occurred and how it is affecting day to day life and business. 

Lack of Strategy Customization 

Your team is dishing out boilerplate strategies that aren’t customized to the prospect, their pain points, or their preferences. Lack of customization in an increasingly more personalized world is a sure fire way to lose a deal. 

Your “Solution” is Not Solving a Real Problem

Your team has not done the job that a polished sales professional should, and that is outline the “why” behind a plan or strategy, and highlight the organizational problem that your strategy helps solve. 

We put together 6 tips that we have seen, when executed correctly and consistently, help to increase both Sales Velocity and Win Ratio through better understanding, prospect targeting, subject matter expertise, and customization.

Tip #1: Fish in the Right Ponds

Learn who your best customers are, and why, and find prospects that fit that criteria. Some of the criteria that has generated the best results for polished and robust sales organizations over the years include lookalikes of your current customers who:

• Spend the most 
• Have been with you the longest
• Exist in verticals where you drive the best product or service results

Tip #2: Conduct a Great Discovery Call 

• Ask tons of questions to get context into their overall business and goals
• Do NOT leave the call (or allow your Sales team to do so) without getting an understanding of their pain points, decision making criteria, budget and timelines  

Tip #3: Solve a Problem, Do NOT Just Sell a Product

• Tap into the pain point from the discovery call and drive that home with your SOLUTION
• Solution selling as opposed to commodity selling

Tip #4: Build Empathy and Rapport With Your POC

Prioritize building a good relationship so that you can ask candid questions on feedback and establish trust 

Tip #5: Ask For the Order, and Handle Objections

Don’t shy away from asking direct questions, and keep asking until you get an answer. 

Tip #6: Shorten your Sales Cycle

It’s common sense in sales that the longer the delay, the less likely you are to ever connect with a lead. Ideally shoot to respond in no more than one hour to contact qualified sales opportunities, but aim for the holy grail of a real-time handover from SDR to AE.

In conclusion, there are a few key factors that truly affect Sales Velocity and Win Ratio. Through better targeting, customization, subject matter expertise and gathering the right information in an emotionally intelligent way, you and your sales organization will be able to increase these numbers, and make the MOST out of the leads in your pipeline, and with a quick turnaround to really be able to make it rain.