Earlier this summer, Gareth wrote about the strike zone and how sales is a lot like baseball: “The key to success, in baseball and sales, is to avoid swinging at low-percentage pitches and wasting precious at-bats.”
Over the past three months, InsightSquared has built a series of reports that help you home in on which sales opportunities are likely to be the most beneficial to your company – which opportunities are in your strike zone – so you can target your efforts strategically.
Strike Zone
Our new Strike Zone report (currently in The Lab) allows you to predict your sales success based on historical performance. The report plots your open opportunities on a graph of total age versus value. Behind the points is a heat map showing you the win rate for similar historical opportunities.
Opportunities that lie in the green zone – your “strike zone” – are, in theory, more likely to be won than those in a red zone. The legend indicates your min, max and average win rates across all segments of the chart.
We continue to investigate other opportunity properties that might be good candidates to show on a graph like Strike Zone. Stay tuned for more updates and reports in this area.
Win Factors
You also might be interested to know how things like value, number of value changes, and number of close date changes affect your win rate. Are opportunities that have had two close date pushes more likely to be won than those with six? What’s the “sweet spot” in terms of value for won opportunities?
The second major analysis report we have launched is the Win Factors report. On the three tabs of Win Factors, you can see how various properties of an opportunity predict your win rate, and drill in to view lists of specific opportunities in each category.
These reports are both still in The Lab, and as we continue to build new screens to help you run your business, expect to see these screens graduated to other sections of our product and newer, even more innovative screens take their place!
We hope that the insights gleaned from InsightSquared’s business intelligence solution will help you better manage your pipeline and sales team, and bring in more revenue for your company. Feel free to contact me at cjelly@insightsquared.com with questions and suggestions about this or other reports.
