“Win rates declining [over the two-year period] from 23% to 19% might not seem all that significant. But in terms of required pipeline, it repre

Target Pipeline Coverage is Not the Inverse of Win Rate

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Style Pass

2024-06-10 04:00:03

“Win rates declining [over the two-year period] from 23% to 19% might not seem all that significant. But in terms of required pipeline, it represents a dramatic shift from 4.3x to 5.3x coverage.”

It’s the kind of sentence that you might read, nod your head in hasty agreement, and then keep going. But you’d be wrong to do that. Quite wrong. And a lot of people make this mistake.

Thus, in this post, I’ll explain why it’s wrong to invert win rate to calculate target pipeline coverage, demonstrate that with a spreadsheet, and then give you a better way to determine target pipeline coverage.

Before diving into the math, let’s take a second to sanity check [1] the conclusion reached above: you’re going to need 5.3x pipeline coverage. Given that the rule of thumb [2] for pipeline coverage is 3.0x, how do we feel about requiring 5.3x? My thoughts:

So, if the answer is that we need 5.3x pipeline coverage to make plan, I’m going to have a lot of questions without doing any math at all. But now, let’s cut to the math.