Analysis
Why sales benchmarks from other companies do not describe yours.
Cross company benchmarks, such as won deals averaging a particular number of emails, describe an average across every business in a dataset. Your own closed deals are the only sample that describes your business, and you already have them.
What a benchmark actually is.
A figure like won deals involve 29% more email, averaging 141 emails, is an average across every company in a dataset. It mixes a six week transactional sale with an eighteen month enterprise cycle.
That average describes no real company. If your deals close in five weeks with twenty emails, a benchmark of 141 does not tell you that you are losing. It tells you that you are not the average.
Where benchmarks are useful.
Direction, not magnitude. More stakeholders correlating with higher win rates is a real finding and it almost certainly holds in your business too.
How much more is the part that does not transfer, and how much more is the part you need to weight a score.
You already have a better sample.
Every deal you have closed in the last two years is a labelled dataset about your business specifically. It is smaller than a vendor benchmark and it is about you, which is the trade worth making.
The question to ask of it is simple: what was true of the deals we won that was not true of the deals we lost.
Testing it rather than trusting it.
Kaypo runs this as a back test. Your weights, applied to your own closed deals using only what was true before they closed, with the result showing how cleanly they separate wins from losses.
If they separate cleanly, you have a score worth acting on. If they do not, you change the weights and run it again. Either way you find out before anybody relies on a number.
Questions
Are sales benchmarks useful?
For direction, yes. For magnitude, rarely. A cross company average mixes transactional and enterprise cycles, so the specific number describes an average business that does not exist.
How do you build a scoring model from your own data?
Compare what was true of deals you won against deals you lost, weight those differences, then test the weights against past outcomes to confirm they separate the two.
It arrives in Slack
Every morning, each rep gets one message naming the deals on their own book that moved overnight, biggest mover first, with the reason beside each number and the deals that have gone quiet underneath.
$99 a month, cancel any time.. Everyone on the team. No per seat charge. Connect a CRM and it runs. No implementation fee. 14 day trial. No card.
Related reading
Can you change how your deal score is calculated
Most deal scores cannot be opened or adjusted. Why that matters the first time one is wrong about your business, and what an editable model gives you instead.
What counts as a good win rate, and how to measure yours honestly
Win rate benchmarks are mostly useless because everybody counts differently. What to measure instead, and the three ways the number gets inflated.
Kaypo vs Backstory
Backstory is enterprise revenue intelligence for CROs, live in two to four weeks. Kaypo scores every deal and posts to Slack the day you connect.
Reviewed September 20, 2026 against the product as it behaves today.