In a previous post, Dial It Up: Optimizing Pipeline for Better ACV Outcomes, I dove into some examples of how the dials (ASP, velocity, win rate)  in your predictable revenue plan impact your results.

A big part of building a predictable revenue model is making sure that you understand (and, most importantly, use!) the assumptions in your plan that are tied to the realities of your business. If you don’t know your ASP, or you’re using a benchmark win rate, the only thing that will be predictable about your plan is that it will be consistently inaccurate!

Garbage in, garbage out.

These assumptions - your dials - help you make strategic decisions about how you grow your business, assign actionable goals for your team, and provide measurable KPIs by which to gauge your progress.

I’m going to focus on ways in which your teams can take action to improve your results. This assumes you know your baseline win rates, ASP, and sales cycle. Using that knowledge, let’s look at some of the actions we could take to turn these dials, and which teams can make it happen.

How to Increase Your Win Rate

We all wish we could win 100% of the time. Unless you’re selling the only product in a new category you invented, chances are you’ve got some form of competition and that there will be room for improvement.

Increasing your win rate is one of the most powerful dials you can turn. Boosting how often you ring the bell on a new license deal by just a point or two can have dramatic impacts on your revenue. We covered some of this math in my previous post on Dial It Up: Optimizing Pipeline for Better ACV Outcomes

Here are some examples of how your teams might proactively take action to affect the win rate dial:

• Marketing dives deeper into its data to understand where you win more often and commits to reallocating budget for new demand generation campaigns in that segment or ICP.  If you’ve been generating the same number of opportunities in the Consumer Electronics and Food & Beverage verticals, but Consumer Electronics has a 10% higher win rate, shifting the balance of pipeline production in that direction will mean more at-bats and pitches in your sweet spot.

• Sales identifies key areas where your offering doesn’t stack up well against the competition. Developing a new playbook to pre-emptively position and sideline would-be objections can result in your team taking down a few more of those deals every quarter.

• The C-Suite invests in a formal win/loss program. Qualitative interviews gather new insights directly from customers and prospects lost to other vendors. These ongoing learnings help guide new selling motions, such as making self-guided demos readily available to qualified prospects.

• Product recgonizes the offering itself needs a tweak or two, and reprioritizing the roadmap to bring a tangible competitive advantage to the market can make a big impact on win rates.

Considerations for how you impact the dials create critical moments for cross-functional alignment and shared goal setting. To illustrate how your team can come together to do this let’s drill in on one of the examples above.

Through great quantitative and qualitative analysis provided by your win-loss program, you’ve identified that Consumer Electronics is your strongest vertical overall. The profile of these deals looks like this:

• You enjoy a 10% higher win rate in this market than average.

• Deal sizes are similar as you generally sell the same product to each vertical.  

• These deals, however, do take 30 days longer than your average deal.

If you do nothing more than create more opportunities in this vertical, you arguably end up with 33% more deals (the difference between a 30% and 40% win rate; which means 10 more deals for every 100 opportunities).

During the planning process, Sales and Marketing agree to a new SLA based on this higher win rate. Marketing will need to generate fewer overall qualified opportunities for Sales, but the definition of “qualified”  must include accounts in the Consumer Electronics vertical.

Sales, knowing it will be selling into a highly focused segment, doubles down on sales training and enablement tools for competing in this vertical. They may also ask that Product Marketing provide deeper competitive intelligence and assets geared at this vertical (e.g. customer case studies).

Meanwhile, the Solutions or Sales Engineering team is tasked with creating self-guided demos that highlight use cases specific to Consumer Electronics; And they, in turn, ask Product to prioritize certain features on the roadmap which have the biggest implications for this segment.

All of the above actions are captured in a shared document, with dates, dependencies, and KPIs to track progress (OKRs are great for this).

And ultimately everyone has a single shared KPI to measure cross-functional success here: an increased win rate that results in more repeatable and predictable revenue over time.

Consider all of the above-aligned efforts. More than likely, when executed, these changes will have a positive impact on more than just the win rate. Deals, fueled by better messaging, demos, selling motions, and product are likely to move faster. And as your team shares more value, demonstrates its expertise, and providers stronger offerings in the vertical, they earn the right to a higher price tag, increasing ASPs.

Not directly measured in the impact on the dials of your model are the intangibles like team morale. Working towards clear goals that are ultimately measured by a shared KPI is an awesome feeling - a far stronger motivator than a siloed team goal like “leads” or “meetings” that are hard to tie directly back to dollars.

The key to making this work is codifying actions and tying everyone to a shared goal in your plan. It can seem obvious that you want to get everyone aligned on a highly targeted go-to-market strategy, but it is so easy for critical items to get lost in the shuffle of the everyday. 

There is always a fire to put out and it’s really important to have this clarity at the beginning of your planning cycle, and that actions tied to shared goals are consistently revisited throughout the quarter.

Get it right, up front

As demonstrated above, increasing win rates, boosting your ASP, or moving deals more quickly requires more than just changing the number in your model.

That may sound obvious but you would be amazed at how often leaders will adjust the dials to better suit their goals, without considering the reality or the ramifications of doing so.

To illustrate this, let’s create a “sliding doors” moment and look at what happens if you don't get everyone on board up front.

Take for example the marketing leader who sees a qualified opportunity target that seems unreasonable to hit with the budget and headcount she has. A quick solution to the volume challenge is to assume that the sales team will win more deals this year than in previous years. 

Moving a win rate from 30% to 40% dramatically lowers the number of opportunities required to hit revenue goals. And hey, we’ll need to figure out how we increase win rates by 33% -- but that’s a problem for another day!

Again, there are a number of ways to increase win rates and they require buy-in and execution from a wide array of people across different teams:

• new product

• improved packaging

• stronger competitive messaging

• better targeting

• optimized sales enablement 

All possibilities, but without the owners of these functions 1) agreeing 2) prioritizing and 3) executing on any of these, increasing your win rate is a pipe(line) dream -- and the most likely outcome is landing short of pipeline goals and missing revenue targets.

Going back to the example above, it’s unlikely our marketing leader will literally wave away the increased win rate as a challenge to be solved for another day. But so often these changes to the plan are made with good intentions. We know we’ll need to improve our sales enablement tools and that we’ll need to update our value proposition. 

Frankly, “we have to” because we need to “just find a way” to increase the win rate by 33%.

If someone says “we’ll just need to find a way” in a meeting about win rates, ASPs, velocity or other critical dynamics of your pipeline...and is then ready to move on, stop the meeting! Make sure to nail down actions before anyone leaves that room.  

If you leave that meeting without discussing (and agreeing and codifying) the ways in which you will improve win rates, there is a very good chance that in a few months, you’ll be back in that same room with the same people trying to figure out why you missed revenue targets.

The road to revenue hell is paved with good intentions!

When making decisions on how you can impact the dials of your predictable revenue model, you create an awesome moment for cross-functional alignment and shared goal setting.

The key is to make sure this happens and is codified during the planning process.

Being Prepared for the Unexpected

Understanding the dials of your plan and getting everyone aligned on them during the planning process ensures that you’re proactive about building predictable revenue.

The benefits of this alignment go far beyond the planning stage.

This practice gets every revenue-responsible team on the same page and speaking the same language. It helps everyone understand how their responsibilities and work impacts revenue, and how their activities can positively or negatively impact results. And it gets everyone thinking in terms of the dials so that when push comes to shove everyone is ready to respond.

You may unexpectedly get a boost from great press coverage, organic interest in your offering, or a new partnership. On the flip side, a new vendor or an acquisition may shake things up, the economy may take a turn for the worse, or staff changes may throw inconsistency into your execution.

Inevitably there are moments when you’ll need to be reactive.

In the same way that you can control the dials and tune them to your advantage, you need to remain aware and vigilant of impacts outside your control. 

If your win rates go up, awesome! Maybe it’s time to step on the accelerator and blow through that 50% growth target. Or perhaps Finance wants to sit on cash in the short term or reallocate it from pipeline creation to R&D.  

When win rates drop, it’s time to react and create a “Get Well” plan. This may entail taking steps to improve the win rate mentioned above or to start turning some other dials like ASP or velocity.

If you haven’t already built the muscle memory by being proactive in your planning, your reaction time to these unexpected blips can kill a quarter, or worse, a fiscal year.

Instead of moving quickly to adjust on-the-fly, you get bogged down in trying to understand what’s happening.

How do you course correct? And who needs to do what?

If you’ve built the muscle memory, then your teams will be ready to adjust.

New shared goals are set, actions are assigned, and everyone gets their marching orders from a “Gun it” or “Get Well” plan.

Like any team sport, if you’re practiced and prepared you’re going to have more positive results. 

You’ll be ready to hit the gas in good times and course correct in bad times.

That’s a win-win.