Know Your Ratios

This week’s sales pipeline tip is nice and simple. Know your sales conversion ratios.

Understanding the conversion ratios for each stage of our sales process AND for each salesperson is crucial for three reasons:

1. Planning and projecting
2. Spotting drops in performance
3. Identifying areas for improvement

Each of our salespeople work differently. They have various individual strengths and weaknesses. And it’s these characteristics that we need to bring to light through data.

First Step

Calculate the % conversion between each stage of the sales process. This will immediately give us the weakest part of our sales pipeline that needs work.

Second Step

We need to do this again but for each salesperson. Now we will be able to facilitate quality conversations between our salespeople as to why they all perform better/worse in specific areas of the sales funnel. This information will then form the crux of any coaching sales enablement or process changes we implement. (Read my guide to data-driven 1:1s)

Now we have the data, we can start to plan more effectively by looking into the forecast integrity of each salesperson, the total of which will be immediately more reliable.

Think Differently

There is one very simple change to a typical conversion ratio that will make the results infinitely more valuable. Instead of looking at the conversions for all of time, we should calculate them for deals won in specific sales periods. This will tell us exactly how many opportunities our sales people need at each stage for December specifically, not just in general.

Read my sales pipeline management guide for more sales pipeline tips.