Since several readers were intrigued by the conversion rate email from yesterday, here’s more food for thought.
I was reading the webpage Measuring Conversion Rates in Salesforce and Gabrielle has another perspective on this topic.
She defines the conversion rate as a transition. Using yesterdays example,
The conversion rate of A to B is the number of opportunities who used to be A and are now B, divided by the total number of opportunities in A and B. e.g. B* / (A + B) where B* used to be A.
To set this up, you need to track the stage history, and she only considers an adjacent step. She doesn’t track conversions from A to C, although I suppose you could use the same formula to do so.
I’m just not quite sure whether I would call this as a conversion rate or something else. Would you?
For your information, in my situation, I asked my client questions such as
- What is the purpose of this metric?
- How will it be used and who needs it?
- Which decisions will be made as a result?
- Which transitions need to be tracked? (I didn’t want to do all)
- What if you didn’t have this metric?
The takeaway
It seems conversion rates can be defined in multiple ways. So make sure your definition and your client’s definition are aligned.