Two accountancy firms report their opportunity win rates. Firm A wins 97.4% of the opportunities it closes. Firm B wins 62.3%.
Most partners would take Firm A’s number without a second thought. We’d suggest looking at the data underneath first.
37 wins for every loss
Firm A has recorded 5,704 wins and just 153 losses, roughly 37 wins for every loss. Any firm with a pipeline that size loses work regularly. Prospects choose a competitor, defer the project or simply go quiet. Very little of that appears in Firm A’s CRM.
Firm B looks weaker on paper. But it records every opportunity from an agreed point, captures a reason for almost every loss and keeps its pipeline current. Its lower win rate is the more honest number, and the more useful one.
What a win rate really measures
A win rate measures CRM behaviour before it measures sales performance. When losses don’t reach the CRM, the win rate goes up and the insight goes down. The firm is left with a record of the work it won and very little about the work it didn’t.
That matters, because decisions about pricing, services, marketing spend and capacity all rest on the same data.
A quick test
Open your own CRM and count the wins you’ve recorded for every loss. If the answer is well into double figures, the number probably isn’t telling you what you think it is. Our whitepaper, Is a 97.4% Win Rate Really Better Than 62.3%?, compares the two firms side by side and ends with six questions you can use to test your own pipeline
