Why are sales teams and their RevTech vendors using broken approaches to estimate win rates?
Funnelcast win rates estimate the chance a deal will be won by some future date. Every other method we’ve seen to estimate “win rates” is different. And, frankly, dangerously misleading.
People use the common won/(won + lost) formula (aka WOWPL), start-time-based cohorts, and many other half-baked estimation techniques. If these are so good, why aren’t other fields using them? Let’s see.
If you get a cancer diagnosis, you want to reliably know the chance that you will survive over the next year—with or without potential treatments. Funnelcast uses the same proven mathematical techniques that epidemiologists use to answer this question. If doctors used the equivalent of WOWPL, no one would know whether a treatment is effective or not. It just wouldn’t work.
Ever wonder why your term-life insurance policy premium goes up a little every year? It’s because actuaries are using the same models Funnelcast uses to estimate the chance of death. In sales, we are estimating the chance of a win. If companies priced insurance the way other RevTech vendors compute win rates, insurers would all go out of business.
WOWPL and other methods simply don’t tell you what you need to know—the chance a deal will be won by some future date. (Or what that has been in the past, or how different groups compare.)
Understanding win rates is the most important thing in sales math. Win rates power forecasts, planning, and sales optimization. You don’t want to get them wrong.
Funnelcast is the only vendor that gets win rates right. We even show you how to compute win rates yourself! But that’s just the foundation. Funnelcast does a lot more: baseline forecasts, capacity planning, deal scoring, pull-in scoring, demand gen optimization and planning, pipeline hygiene, sales process control, scenario planning, cohort comparison, waterfalls, forecast tracking, historic trends (measured correctly), custom reporting, sales optimization (what to do to most effectively beat a goal), portfolio-optimization-based pipeline focus,… Our mission is to help you sell more. We start by getting win rates right.
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