March 10, 2025

What should my acceptance rate be?

One of the folks in Backchannel asked a good question that I don’t think I’ve addressed here on the mailing list in a long time:

What percentage of my offers should get accepted?

Personally, I’d want to see at least an 80% acceptance rate on any project proposals I write because writing project proposals isn’t my favorite use of time and energy.

But for prospective clients who are merely considering buying a productized service and we just communicate briefly over email, I don’t really care what the acceptance rate is.

That said, if the acceptance rate on a productized service is really low (maybe under 20% of inquirers purchasing), I might question the relevance of the offering to my audience and potentially replace it with something else.

So... TL;DR:

If you’re writing custom project proposals and your acceptance rate is lower than 80%, you probably need to upgrade how you’re running your sales/discovery calls.

Yours,

—J

BackRandomNext