If I were a Sales Executive for a day, I wouldn’t abolish win rates. But I would radically change how they’re understood and how sales (and bid teams) are measured against them.
Most organisations obsess over volume: number of calls, meetings, or pipeline value. Win rates then become a blunt instrument, used to pressure individuals rather than improve the system.
The result? Sales qualify everything in sight, bid teams drown in workload, and proposals lose their power.
At my previous company, and now at nFold, we tackled this with an “OK to Awesome” KPI reset. Instead of holding individuals hostage to outcomes they couldn’t fully control, we measured the controllable inputs that drove the outcomes we wanted. Training became compulsory. Peer-to-peer teaching and quarterly tests embedded best practice. We tracked process adoption, quality of capture intelligence, and collaboration scores from 360° reviews. Innovation was measured and rewarded.
Here’s the punchline: we didn’t set win rate as a KPI, but win rates rose by more than 35%, within one year. Not because people feared the metric, but because behaviours improved. Morale improved too. Teams stopped pointing fingers and started pulling together.
The best wins don’t happen in the bid room alone. Research shows they often happen long before an RFP arrives – through capture planning, customer insight, competitive positioning, and disciplined qualification. But a poor proposal will still lose a well-qualified deal. The two are inseparable. Treating sales and bids as separate functions with disconnected KPIs misses the point.
I’d stop measuring sales on pipeline size and closure alone. I’d measure:
- How well capture plans are built and kept alive
- How early and effectively the bid team is engaged
- The quality of customer, competitor, and capability insights fed into CRM
- The degree to which knowledge is transferred into proposals
Win rates matter, but as a shared, team-owned measure of system health. After all, we are in this game to win – which in my view is a team sport!
My ideal sales measures would focus on the behaviours and collaboration that feed winning proposals, not just on filling the funnel. Because the best wins come when everyone in the Business Development Lifecycle works toward aligned goals. It’s about building a winning culture. That’s how you move from OK to Awesome.
Ask yourself: are your sales/bid metrics helping you win, or just helping you measure how fast you’re losing?
Larissa Cornelius
With over 12 years in business development and proposal consultancy, Larissa offers bid expertise across various industries. She has trained thousands of people and worked with over 260 companies on strategic bid work. She has a further seven years of operational management expertise and actively promotes the proposal profession by combining proposal best practices with her operational and sales background, helping businesses win more.
