Glossary term
Win Rate
Win rate is the share of closed deals that you won. The formula is simple; the trouble starts when the team has not agreed on what goes into it.
What is win rate?
Win rate is a sales metric that expresses won deals as a percentage of all deals closed in a given period. The basic formula is won deals / (won deals + lost deals) x 100. Open deals are left out because their outcome is not known yet. It can be calculated by deal count or by deal value, and the two tell different stories: the count version measures how well the team converts opportunities, while the value version shows how much of the closed revenue it actually captures. Teams use win rate to size the pipeline they need for a target, and to compare reps, lead sources and segments.
It is sometimes called close rate, although some teams use close rate for won deals as a share of every opportunity opened, including those still undecided. Write down which definition your reports use.
Calculating it: an example
An office-furniture supplier closed 40 deals in the second quarter (illustrative figures):
- By count: 14 won and 26 lost, so win rate = 14 / 40 = 35%.
- By value: SAR 420,000 won out of SAR 1,500,000 closed, so value win rate = 28%.
The gap between 35% and 28% is a finding in itself: the team wins the small deals and loses the large ones. Splitting the same quarter by source adds another layer:
| Source | Won | Lost | Win rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer referrals | 6 | 5 | 55% |
| Trade shows | 5 | 9 | 36% |
| Digital ads | 3 | 12 | 20% |
Referral deals close at almost three times the rate of ad-sourced deals, which changes where rep time and marketing budget should go.
In Naffes CRM
Naffes CRM puts win rate in the KPI panel next to the deals list, worked out from decided deals only (won and lost) and paired with the average cycle length in days. The same figure is one of the four KPIs on the home dashboard. Because the number is only as honest as the closing discipline behind it, Naffes enforces two rules:
- A deal can be marked Won only with an amount above zero and at least one linked contact or company, whether the win comes from the Won button, a bulk action, the API, a workflow or the AI assistant.
- Marking a deal Lost requires a loss reason by default, so the losing side of the equation can be analyzed.
For deeper cuts, the report builder (Starter plan and up) creates custom deal reports where you choose the metric, the grouping and the period, and the ready-made Sales performance template installs in one click from dashboards. To understand the losses, see loss reason.
Mistakes that make win rate misleading
- Leaving dead deals open. A deal that will never close is not counted as lost, so the rate looks better than it is.
- Deleting lost deals instead of closing them. Part of the denominator disappears, and the lesson goes with it.
- Logging every inquiry as a deal. The rate drops because the denominator is full of people who were never qualified.
- Blending different motions, such as new business and renewals, into one number.
Questions
Questions 2
What is a good win rate?
No single number fits every industry: a complex enterprise sale behaves nothing like a simple fixed-price product. The useful comparisons are your own performance over consecutive periods, and your sources and reps against each other, with a stable definition of what counts as a deal.
Do open deals count toward win rate?
No, only decided deals do. But an open deal that has not moved for months should be closed as lost with a clear reason; otherwise the rate stays higher than reality.