Article · 18 min read

Win Rates, Close Rates and Milestone vs. Cohort Analysis

Dave Kellogg · Kellblog Free Advanced

Kellogg's point that a deal that died internally is a different animal from a deal you lost to a competitor, and that mixing them lets you report a 66 percent win rate while actually winning four opportunities in a hundred. Fix your categories before you trust any win/loss number.

  • Narrow win rate is wins over wins plus losses, broad win rate is wins over wins plus losses plus derails.
  • Every sales accepted opportunity ends in one of three states: won, lost, or other (derailed, no decision).
  • Milestone analysis counts what crossed a stage in a period, cohort analysis follows a generation of leads forward to resolution.
  • With a nine month cycle, deals closing in quarter N were mostly created in quarter N minus 3, which is why milestone math misleads.
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The question it answers

  1. How do I run win/loss properly, so that losing a deal actually teaches us something?

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