How to Level Up Your Sales Game to Increase Win Rate

Win rate is one of the most frequently calculated metrics in the sales industry. It improves sales efficiency, predicts sales numbers, identifies weak links in a sales team, analyzes lost opportunities, and determines highly profitable lead sources. The average win rate across industries is 47%. If you’re wondering how to increase your team’s win rate, continue reading.

What is sales win rate?

Your sales team’s win rate is the percentage of sales-qualified opportunities in the pipeline that are eventually won. It is measured by dividing closed-won deals by the total number of total deals (closed-won and non-closed-won) in the pipeline. 

In other words, it’s the percentage of final-stage prospects that closed and became buyers divided by all deal-stage opportunities that either did or didn’t become buyers.

4 Ways to Improve Sales to Boost Win Rate

1. Invest in sales enablement to build an informed and equipped team

One of the biggest investments that sales leaders are making amid the transition to a remote sales model is a dedicated sales enablement team. Sales enablement is the key to your sales success and increasing win rates, especially when your team adapts to significant changes like remote selling.

Your team will sell more effectively as sales enablement equips them with the right training and coaching, tools and technology, best practices, and customer-facing as well as internal sales content. Sales enablement content management, in particular, empowers you to improve sales, shorten sales cycles, enhance sales effectiveness, and better align with the marketing unit, ultimately leading to a higher sales win rate.

Additionally, sales enablement helps align your sales process with the buyer’s journey and tailor your messaging, communication, and engagement with different targeted personas. Note that 65% of sales leaders who outperformed revenue targets have a dedicated sales enablement person or team. Furthermore, the use of sales enablement tools has increased by 567%, which hints at the growing importance of sales enablement.

2. Free up selling time for your team with operations and tech enhancement

Sales leaders and sellers lose 10-20% of their sales time when trying to wear the hat of sales operations. Internal interruptions, lack of sales technology adoption, unpredictable schedules, unrelated or redundant tasks, and administrative duties are a few reasons why sales teams can’t spend more time selling. 

Remember this simple equation: the less time your sales reps spend selling, the lower your sales win rate.

Seek sales operations and technical support to serve your sales team better to achieve a stronger win rate. Improved sales operations and technology help save sales time, enhance process efficiency and forecasting accuracy, eliminate bottlenecks to accelerate sales, increase lead response time, and optimize strategy and workflow with data-driven insights.

Related Content: Our 10 Favorite Ways Sales Operations Improves Sales Performance Metrics

3. Connect with decision-makers and key influencers within accounts early

One of the secrets to improving sales win rate is not leaving out any single decision-makers or influencers within accounts. When it comes to relationship building, it’s not enough to expand your contact network. Be strategic and build relationships with all key people involved in a deal. 

Further, it would be best if you looped them in from the start of the sales cycle to avoid any last-minute disappointments or roadblocks to a closed-won deal.

A multi-threaded sales approach or multi-threaded relationship building on LinkedIn (establishing multiple relationships at a company, typically 6+ connections) is a powerful strategy to successfully boost sales win rate. 

However, it’s not always easy to do. People may not accept your connection request, and you may not be able to view their contact information on LinkedIn if you’re not connected to them.

To reach decision-makers and other targeted audiences faster, use sales prospecting intelligence tools like RevDriver. This free Chrome extension reveals 95% accurate, human-verified contact data, including direct dials, work mobile numbers, and email addresses, for any individual or business you want to reach while on someone’s LinkedIn profile or company site. (As a free user, you can also export the revealed information to your CRM or MAP!)

4. Have a deeper understanding of leads and focus on creating value for them

Understanding your audience more than just surface-level is a must if you’re looking to increase your sales win rate. 

Your sales team should understand your audience’s needs, what drives their interest, their pain points, and if they’re a good fit. This helps build lasting relationships that go a long way toward increasing the sales win rate.

With B2B data, you can quickly gain in-depth knowledge and insights and an accurate perspective on each lead you want to win. Furthermore, you can create hyper-relevant, hyper-personalized campaigns to push them to become informed buyers.

B2B data helps build trust and brand credibility by allowing you to tailor your presentation to be more relatable for each account. It also enables you to add value to leads by providing information on their industry or market on how your brand can benefit their business.

When using any form of B2B data, make sure it’s clean, accurate, updated, and verified. Leading B2B contact and company data intelligence providers, like SalesIntel, reverify their data every 90 days and offer data enrichment service. 

Final Word of Advice

Be sure to measure, document, and track your sales win rate to stay on the right path to improvement. Determine areas in your sales process that you need to focus on. 

Don’t forget to clearly define your wins and losses, properly break down deal stages, place leads in the right stage as they progress, and establish exit criteria to ensure a higher sales win rate.

Now get to it!

Guest Author: Ariana Shannon, SalesIntel

SalesIntel is the top provider of accurate and affordable sales and marketing contact data with the highest number of direct dials and human-verified contacts in the industry. Our combination of automation and researchers allows us to reach 95% data accuracy for all our published contact data while continuing to scale up our number of contacts. With the most comprehensive contact & company data and our excellent customer service, SalesIntel is your partner in growth.