Charting Sales Close Rate with a Bar-Mekko

One way to increase sales revenue is to increase the percentage of opportunities in the pipeline that you close.  You can measure close rate by dividing opportunities won by opportunities won and lost in a specific time period.  The time period should be fairly long to get a large enough sample of opportunities.  I would typically use a full year as my time period.

Using a Bar-mekko chart you can display close rate versus total number value of opportunities.  In the chart below, I mapped close rate by pipeline stage:

The Bar-mekko allows you to constrast close rate and deal volume.  As you would expect, close rate is inversely related to deal stage.  The later stages have higher close rates.

You can make a similar chart for close rate by product line, industry vertical, sales geography or sales rep.  This will give you a better sense of your higher.  Here is an example of close rate by product line:

I added an average line that allows you to quickly identify which product lines have better and worse than average close rates.  This chart should help senior management allocate resources for sales or product development based on product line.

It's a key part of the sales pipeline dashboard that is up on SlideShare with the link below: