Cracking the Code: The Metric that Will Turbocharge Your Growth
One simple calculation that will change how manage your growth
Jay Ashcroft
August 01, 2023
That’s a wrap on another school year and I hope you had a bumper one.
Let's dive right into an essential bit of number crunching you shouldn't skimp on when you're drawing the curtains on the year's hustle - calculating your win rate. This is one number you don't want to sweep under the carpet, and here's why…
📈 The Scoreboard You Didn't Know You Needed
First off, your win rate is your business's scoreboard. It's the clear-cut stats of how well you or your team have performed.
Take your total number of new customers and divide this by the total number of leads you generated last year.
If you signed up 30 new schools, and you had 100 leads, your win rate is 30% (30/100)
Reviewing this at year's end gives you the nitty-gritty of how you've done, and, more importantly, whether you're getting better, treading water, or sinking a bit.
🎓Tip: Get granular. Track the win rates for every salesperson you have on your team to get an accurate reflection of true performance.
It’s common that the longest serving salesperson in the company will bring in the most revenue, usually because they have a more well established network or they’ve spent longer developing their area.
However, if you dive into the win rates, you might find they’re not actually closing as many opportunities as other people - I’ve seen this at almost every company I’ve worked with.
🎯 Knowing Where To Place Your Bets
Secondly, your win rate is a fortune teller of sorts. It’s got the answers to where you should double down and where to fold. See a high win rate? Great, this is your golden goose, feed it, nurture it, give it what it needs to keep laying those golden eggs.
Spot a low win rate? It’s time to reevaluate. Perhaps this duckling needs a bit more TLC to flourish, or perhaps it's best to let it paddle off into the sunset while you focus your resources elsewhere.
How does your win rate compare in Primary vs Secondary? Are you better in Inner City vs Rural Schools? How about Academies vs Local Authority Schools.
With good data and smart analysis, you can quickly begin to understand where your product fits best (or is most well received), and where you’re pushing uphill to make sales.
🎓Tip: Pricing - there a number of internal factors that influence what you can charge (your cash position, whether you’re investment backed, the LTV of a school, your exit plan and so on), but a good external factor is to look at your win rate. If you’re winning 80%+ of the opportunities that come your way, you’re potentially charging too little.
🤷♂️ If this is all new to you, or you would like a bit of help, I’m here to help.
Having built 2 EdTech companies of my own and worked with more than a dozen category leaders, I’m here to support you on your journey. Best of all there’s no big minimum day rates and you can work with me from just £99 per month.
🕵️♀️ Cracking The Product and Positioning Code
Lastly, your win rate is your personal decoder to what your customers want. This is the ‘expectation gap’ - the school has a problem that they want to solve and your solution is the answer.
One part of this equation is your product features. The second part is how you position your product (your messaging and the benefits you focus on). But which one is it, and which should you invest your time and resources into?
A high win rate? You're speaking that school’s language so don’t change. A low win rate? Time to fine-tune, because you’re not resonating.
What you need to investigate, and this is the tricky part, is whether that’s a lack of features or a messaging issue.
🎓Tip: Customer segments - tweaking your messaging, your sales assets, or your pitch to cater more to the pains / challenges that primary, secondary, or SEN school is experiencing will improve your win rates.
💡 42 Marketing Strategies to Try Next Year
Over the past 13 years, I’ve tried every marketing strategy, campaign and tactic that you can think of, finding the ones that work and the ones that don’t.
From growing my first EdTech into a six-figure revenue business with less than a £10k marketing spend through to leading growth at Arbor Education as we scaled to serve thousands of schools.
In this 10 page guide, I walk through 14 different marketing campaigns, grading the difficulty, each with real life examples so you can try them out for yourself.
To get the guide, share this newsletter through the link below with 1 new person. Once they subscribe, you’ll receive the guide.
As always, thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed it!
Best regards, Jay
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