xSales

I knew football has its xG measure. For Expected Goals. Loosely, or tightly depending on your view, based on the likelihood any created chance is statistically scored.

Now I learn of cricket's equivalent; xW.

Expected Wickets.

It too looks at chances created to earn a dismissal. And is further involved by also assessing an Expected Runs scored off their bowling figure to deduce an overall Expected Average.

Proponents feel this more accurately smooths performance accounting for luck.

For instance, a team-mate can drop dolly of a catch. Umpires can miss a plumb LBW when you've no TV reviews left. Or you keep bowling deliveries that players aren't good enough to hit and sail tantalisingly past their edge.

On this last scenario, highest Test match seamer wicket taker, England's just retired Jimmy Anderson, found the edge in his career a record 2,890. 416 of those providing wickets among his overall record haul of 704. Think of all those chances shelled, or landing from where a fielder had just been moved, or even a play-and-miss that seemed to defy the laws of physics.

Here's précis of London broadsheet sport telly critic, Alan Tyers. On how another recently retired and long-time bowling partner of Anderson, revealed how England use such insight as part of their analysis package.

"The England team today track the amount of “expected wickets” based on quality of deliveries bowled because pure match figures don’t tell the story, and that the advantage of this was that morale does not sink so much after a luckless display, or make a player question if he was doing the right things."

I note one example from the originator of such data back from 2020 which also involved Anderson.

They follow with all manner of stats slices. Yet the point is clear that whether below or above the expected level, the representation allows for a fuller illumination into performance.

In my experience I'm struggling to recall any Sales Ops style resource actively charged with looking at anything resembling this transferred into our Sales arena.

You do come across the sporadic effort to improve forecasting accuracy. Also occasionally a focus on improving (what masquerades as) 'process'. With (late-stage) qualification effectiveness similarly seldom pursued.

Yet given all the rush to algorithm these days, it is astonishing so few selling endeavours have linked together all the elements that truly determine outcome and seek to numerically assess them as, say an xW number, as in Expected Wins.

Yes, forecasting percentages are stock in trade of CRM reports. But they remain pretty much exclusively the preserve of skewing by whatever 'gateways' as set up on the system are passed through rather than real bid winability.

This calc is not meant as your driving figure. But can absolutely augment how your look at potential business in a way your competition likely ignores that genuinely elevates your efforts.

Whatever noun you try out to label such initiative (Sales, Deals, Bids?), the important step is very much to start framing how you calculate your "x".