Any tips for measuring win rate or sales effectiveness against specific competitors when multiple competitors are tagged for each deal?
For example, if you want to look at win rate against Competitor A, but most deals in which we see Competitor A also have Competitor B and/or Competitor C - is deals won against Competitor A / total opportunities vs Competitor A still a good measure?
This is a common scenario for my organisation. Our prospects typically evaluate several vendors. Some are dropped relatively early in the evaluation process, others later on, and that adds another degree of difficulty in reporting win rates. Rightly or wrongly, our approach tends to be... 1. We only deem a competitor as being truly in the deal if they are still in play once the deal has reached a certain stage in our sales cycle; 2. We report on our performance against Competitor A in three ways. First, the number of opportunities in which they were in play. Second, how many of those deals did we win, how many did they win - just as totals. So, for example, there might have been 30 opportunities, we won 10, they won 5, the remaining 15 were won by other vendors or resulted in the prospect not transacting with anybody. Third, we report head-to-head competes where it was essentially just us v Competitor A, e.g. we won 5, they won 1. We have played around with this but found the benefits of producing more detailed analysis - such as adjusting depending on the number of vendors in play - have not justified the extra effort. If I may, I'd add a further comment around the issue of deals that close without anybody winning. I think that's an important adjustment to make. My preferred definition of a loss is an opportunity where the prospect has transacted with somebody other than us.