One of the primary metrics for the project was "Increased Win Rate."
My immediate reaction? What the actual jiggins?
I’ve seen this before, and I’m a big believer that delivering ‘wins’ is not Brand’s job. That is the Sales Team’s job. To hold the Brand team accountable for the final handshake always feels like a setup.
Why? Well, Brand can deliver a perfectly qualified lead. But if the Sales team takes four days to respond, or can’t negotiate the fee, or lacks the soft skills to close, the deal dies. And according to my brief, this is going to be a Brand problem.
From a business point of view, it can’t work like that. If Brand is accountable for the entire chain, it hides where the failure actually lies. Is it the message? Or is it the messenger?
That’s not to say that Brand doesn’t have an influence on the sales process, it just has to be defined within its sphere of influence.
What I do believe is that while Brand cannot sign the contract, it can certainly help dictate the probability of the win. Let’s look at the win rate. Simply put, the win rate is:
Deals Won ÷ Deals in Pipeline.
Most companies try to fix the Deals Won part. But Brand should focus on fixing the Pipeline part.
We once worked with a client who claimed success because they generated 2,000 leads. But the sales team was miserable. They were sifting through 2,000 bad conversations to find a handful of gold. The volume was high, but the quality was low.
And to nobody’s surprise, when you fill the funnel with garbage, your win rate tanks.
And this is where Brand has to play a role. It may seem counterintuitive, but a good brand strategy should serve as a repellent.
A strong brand scares people away. It filters out the tyre-kickers and the low-budget distractions before they ever clog up your CRM. It signals clearly: "We are for this type of client. We are not for everyone. We may not be for you.”
By shrinking the pipeline to only "right-fit" prospects, Brand forces the win rate up mathematically, even if Sales closes the exact same number of deals.
The second place Brand impacts the win is Pricing Power.
If your Sales team is losing deals on price, that is a Brand failure. A strong brand pre-sells the value so that by the time the conversation turns to money, the premium is already justified.
In an ideal world, Brand and Sales should work like peanut butter and chocolate, working in partnership to build growth in the business. The roles should be pretty clear:
- Brand builds trust and authority so the prospect knows exactly who you are before the meeting starts.
- Sales then follows in to do the dirty fighting, inch by inch. Handling objections, negotiating terms, building the relationship, and getting the contract.
But say that you’re boxed in and that you have to accept the “Increase Win Rate” KPI, what then?
Accept "Win Rate" as a secondary KPI, but only on one condition: Brand Strategy must dictate the Sales Narrative.
Brand cannot just be the department that "colours in" while Sales tells a completely different story. The narrative must be consistent from the first time a prospect sees an asset on LinkedIn to the moment they sign the contract.
To be clear, I don’t think that Brand should be held responsible for “Win Rate.” But, if it has to, then it should be on the insistence that Brand controls the narrative, and then controls the quality of the pipeline.
Building growth in a business is a team sport, and each part of that team should have very distinct roles in delivering that growth and should be measured against those.