SQL to Win Conversion Rate
What is Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) to Win Conversion Rate?
Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) are individuals that your sales team has accepted as ready for a direct sales follow up. Using this stage will help your sales and marketing teams stay in sync regarding the quality and volume of leads that you are handing over to your sales team.
The sales metric SQL to win conversion rate is the percentage of sales qualified leads that convert to customers (deals won). By monitoring the conversion rate at this stage, your team will be able to identify potential opportunities to improve the overall sales cycle.
How to calculate SQL to Win Conversion Rate:
(#) of Deals Won / (#) of Sales Qualified Leads = (#) Win Conversion Rate
Pros:
- Understand efficiency of deal closers.
- Understand if there are issues with quality of opportunities generated
Cons:
If your sales cycles span three months, looking at SQLs created then converted to customers within a month won’t tell you an accurate story because there should be no expectation of converting deals within a month.
It’s important to look at Average Sales Cycle Length, to understand over what timeframe you should expect an SQL to convert on average and factor that into the KPI calculation. For example, if your average conversion time from SQL to customer is 3 months, you should take deals closed in month 3 and divide them by SQLs created in month 1.
Relevant Sales Metrics and KPIs:
If you’re adding SQL to Win Conversion Rate to your sales KPI dashboard, you might want to also consider tracking these related sales metrics for context.
Industry Benchmarks and Examples
Implisit analyzed the pipelines of hundreds of companies and found that the average conversion rate from opportunity to customer (another way of saying SQL to Win Conversion Rate) was 6%, and took an average of 18 days to close. However, this varies widely based on what the source of the opportunity was. For example, customer and employee referrals converted at 14.7%, social media at 8.5% and email campaigns at 7.8%. Meanwhile, lead lists convert at just 0.9%, events at 1.0% and webinars at 2.5%. Source.
| Lead Source for B2B companies | Benchmark SQL to Win Conversion Rate |
|---|---|
| Customer/Employee Referral | 14.7% |
| Social Media | 8.5% |
| Email Campaigns | 7.8% |
| Webinars | 2.5% |
| Events | 1.0% |
| Lead Lists | 0.9% |
Additional Notes:
Can also be known Opportunity to Win Conversion Rate. Some businesses add an additional stage after SQL which is called Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) when an Account Executive accepts the lead from a Sales Development Rep, which will introduce different conversion rates and length of time between each stage.
