Despite YoY plummeting win rates, based on my feeds, the biggest challenge facing sellers is not winning, but seems to be prospecting, engaging customers in conversations, hopefully finding and qualifying new opportunities.
The data seems to support this, customers saying they don’t want to talk to sellers, outreaches to get a single response are 7-10 times what was required just a few years ago. When we actually get a customer on a call, our conversion rates are horrible, and getting worse.
The solution too many seem to have is, “Do more!” AI and other tools enable us to ramp up the volume of outreach endlessly. But all this produces is spiraling declines in results.
So what do win rates have to do with prospecting? Many would argue they are independent. “Once we find a qualified opportunity, our win rates are based on the percentage of those that we win. It is completely independent of our prospecting!”
Here’s my argument, win rates are critical to high impact prospecting!
Sellers with higher win rates are much more effective in their prospecting outreach than those with low win rates.
Why is this?
These high win rate sellers have a deeper understanding of the right customers, organizations and individuals, to target. They have a deeper understanding of the things these people care about and the problems/challenges that impact them. They have a deeper knowledge about how to talk to these people about these issues, perhaps inciting them to buy, but at least creating greater interest with the right people.
Low win rate sellers are very bad at this. If they are incapable of having these high quality conversations with people committed to buying something, why would the be any better in having conversations with people who may not be or may be undecided? A low win rate seller represents their offerings poorly to committed buyers. Think of the havoc they can create in prospecting! Think of the brand damage they create when these prospects think, “These people are clueless, they don’t understand, why would I ever consider this company, why would my colleagues ever waste time with these companies?”
Then we go to the numbers/volumes of prospect needed. To achieve their goals, high win rate sellers need fewer qualified opportunities than low win rate sellers. As a result, they need to prospect and find fewer new opportunities. So if we combine highly impactful first conversations, with the requirement for fewer of those conversations, this tends to feed on increasing the quality of those conversations, producing more from each conversation.
Low win rate sellers need far more. So while they are doing a terrible job at winning qualified deals, they must find the time to do very high volumes of very bad prospecting calls. Numerically, these people are in a death spiral.
And we constantly see the results of this lunacy, with the skyrocketing volumes of prospecting outreach, the plummeting results.
“But Dave, you don’t understand, very few of our sellers are ‘full cycle,’ we have SDRs doing the prospecting! They are independent of the AEs who are responsible for win rates!”
The reality is this reinforces my argument. SDRs are typically entry level employees. They have little experience, little understanding of actually working with customers are they are buying and solving their problems. As a result, their ability to connect with anyone other than those customers in very late cycle transactional purchases is very low. And it isn’t their fault, they are reading the scripts they’ve been told to read but have little understanding of what they mean to customers. And we’ve seen, increasingly the failure of the SDR model.
We see a tendency for more full cycle sellers, but we can still leverage SDRs for prospecting. But what if we took high performing sellers and move them into SDR roles. Imagine what they might produce. I’ve written about this before in “My $500K SDRs.”
How do we fix the prospecting problem?
We fix it by first fixing the win rate problem. By helping our people win more deals, more effectively, they gain the experience, understanding, knowledge and ability to engage prospects with much greater impact. And in doing this, we shift everything in our favor.
Afterword: I’m experimenting with a new AI tool. This tool reads the article and two characters conduct a discussion about it. It’s a fascinating perspective, I hope you enjoy listening to it.
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