March 2023: The Industry-wide Decline in Win Rate

In our last message we talked about the effect of discounting on win rate. But in the short two weeks since a surprising development has surfaced related to win rates that we need to sound the alarm about. We are experiencing a steep decline in win rates across regions, sectors, and markets. Win rates in the Enterprise for deals with an ACV of $100,000+ have dropped from an average of 26% to 17% (Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Win rates across WbD customer projects over the first two months of 2023.

Below is a sample of win rates reported for January and February 2023 against average Annual Contract Value (ACV). Look-up your approximate ACV and check the win rate.  You will see a steep decline, a far cry from the numbers that many forecasts and budgets were based on only months ago.

Table 1. Win rates across WbD customer projects over the first two months of 2023. 

In a healthy economy, it is not uncommon to see a temporary, even steep, decline in win rates. Such a drop can be attributed to a significant increase in opportunities, for example, after a tradeshow or online event. But in most cases the product of the volume of opportunities and lower win rate tends to balance itself out.

However, this time sellers are also reporting a steep decline in opportunities. And sellers talk of a more complex decision process, with a more prominent role of the CFO, delaying the sales cycle. They are (against our advice) responding by increasing the discount level to force a decision. This has proven again and again, to not help but actually both hurt win rate and lengthen sales cycles.

Furthermore, we do not foresee any significant improvement in the economic situation until late summer, with effects worsening in the near term. In addition, we anticipate an increase in churn over the next 60 days.

We therefore advise Revenue Leaders/Architects to caution their management team of this worrisome development, measure your own win rate, and discuss a plan!

To be a step ahead, we are launching Impact Sprints to assist those customers with an urgent need..

What is an Impact Sprint?

Impact Sprints are focused programs aimed at improving one specific component of your go-to-market system. Impact Sprints are designed to be deployed quickly, provide quick impact, and are priced to get board approval. Impact sprints consist of three parts:

Step 1 // Turn-by-turn Directions: Listen to call recordings and familiarize ourselves with your process to customize the training and build turn-by-turn directions and scorecards, and integrate them in the existing toolstack.

Step 2 // Training [2-hours]: Keep the training short & simple, and focus on its essential elements. We keep it purposely simple to increase adoption, this is key.

Step 3 // Coach [1hr/week]: Four weeks of actually doing it. One of our skills coaches review calls every Friday “Top Gun flight school” style, to help teams learn from it, iterate, and repeat 4x.

Our initial set of Impact Sprints include:

These programs can be overlaid onto any existing Sales Methodology, or Sales Process.

Interested in exploring an Impact Sprint?
Contact us here to be in touch with a team member »

We continue to offer many other training options to get your team skilled up in short order. See details below…

What is new in the Revenue Academy

Sign-up now for the Revenue Academy’s Open Courses, a few spots are still available for March and April. Check availability here:

Impact: We live it. We dream about it.

Here’s to driving it,

The crew at Winning by Design