The hit rate is a metric of business performance associated with
sales. It is the number of connected contacts as a percentage of the number of
attempts. It is defined in terms of the number of sales of a product divided by
the number of customers who visit e-commerce websites, call, or visit a company
to find more about the product. The hit rate is used to
describe the success rate of an effort. Hit rates are easy to figure out. Take,
for instance, a call center agent makes around 30 calls every day and has more
than 30 opportunities or prospects each day. The agents will likely sell out
his product to a specific number of those prospects.
The hit rate is based on a sales funnel measuring the number of
sales prospects that you have at different stages of the sales pipeline. The
sales hit ratio is the number of sales you make as a percentage of the number
of prospects you have identified.
Hit rate formula:
Number of sales/Number
of prospects x 100
The higher the hit rate, the better the salesperson is at making
sales. The lower the hit rate, the fewer sales will get closed by the
salesperson. After knowing the number of sales in your quota, you can easily
determine the number of qualified prospects that are in your pipeline. The hit
rate may be measured for the whole sales force or by sales region, salesperson,
or product group. It may be used to benchmark the different sales periods and
to benchmark the effectiveness of the own sales force with other companies of
the same sector.
For any business, it is quite easy to track the hit rate. And,
you must track hit rates for trending purposes if you aren’t already. But if
you intend on knowing how you are doing and what workload is coming into your
backlog, you should monitor the conversion rate as well. It is a more accurate
way of measuring marketing success and finding the marketing strategy that will
yield higher returns on investment for your company.
If you attempt to compare your stats against other firms, you
will have difficulty selecting which data to include in your hit
rate/conversion rate. To do that, make sure you track and compare both
year-to-year and quarter-to-quarter.
You should also track project trends at least quarterly, if not
more frequently, so you can determine if you lose or win in certain types of
projects regularly. If necessary, take corrective action.
How can you increase
the hit rate?
If you want to increase the hit rate, here are some ways to do
it:
- Do not waste time on customer deals that have less scope of turning into success and focus on the opportunities with the highest rate of conversion.
- Customer representatives must not waste the customers' time. Instead, they must invest time in building customer’s trust.
- Work on your coaching abilities and identify your strengths and weaknesses as perceived by the customer.
- Invest in maximizing your coaching abilities.
Keep all these factors in mind and improve the hit rate of your
business in a short period.