How to Use Baseball’s xBA Metric to Measure Your Sales Pipeline and Improve Your Sales Forecasts

  • May 4, 2026
  • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
  • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Lucky or Unlucky? BA vs xBA in Sales. Split image showing a glowing red baseball strike zone sweet spot on the left and a 3x3 sales qualification zone map on the right labeled 'Probability of Success' with Sweet Spot (All Criteria Met) in red, Some Criteria Met in coral, and Most Criteria Missing in blue.

Do You Have Good, Bad, Lucky or Unlucky Salespeople?

What are the chances that two different Hollies songs — “Long Cool Woman” and “The Air That I Breathe” — would be playing at the exact same moment on two different SiriusXM channels (14 and 26)?

Grok calculated the odds at roughly 1 in several thousand. I got lucky.

That rare moment got me thinking: What are the chances that the opportunities in your sales pipeline will actually close? That a salesperson will be lucky? That a salesperson will be unlucky?

Most CRM probability numbers are unreliable because salespeople override them with gut feel. Kurlan & Associates build custom sales scorecards that are far more accurate than standard CRM probabilities but as predictive as they are, they aren’t foolproof.. That’s why I turned to one of baseball’s most insightful metrics — expected batting average (xBA) — to create a better way to evaluate pipeline health, separate skill from luck, and dramatically improve sales forecasts.

To help you understand whether your salespeople are lucky or unlucky, let’s borrow from advanced baseball statistics.

Most people have heard of batting average — the percentage of plate appearances that result in a hit. But there’s a much better metric: expected batting average (xBA). It predicts what the batting average should be based on how hard and where the ball was hit, giving a clearer picture of true skill independent of either good or bad luck.

Take Red Sox leadoff hitter Jarren Duran. On May 1 in the 2026 season he was hitting only .185, a truly dreadful batting average.

But his xBA was .295 – 110 points higher – showing that Duran was extremely unlucky. I’ve witnessed his string of bad luck, watching balls that he crushed get caught.

Take a look at Duran’s zone chart (below). He is absolutely crushing pitches right down the middle, but is getting very few hits from pitches in the upper and lower parts of the strike zone.

Jarren Duran 2026 batting average zone map showing high performance in the center sweet spot but low performance in upper and lower strike zones.

Compare that to Mike Trout’s zone chart. Trout is having a much better start to 2026 because he’s crushing the ball in six of the nine zones. Good pitchers can still get him out — but only if they locate perfectly.

Mike Trout 2026 batting average zone map showing strong performance across six of the nine strike zones.

What if we could apply that same lucky/unlucky philosophy to the sales pipeline ?

  • Sweet spot (right down the middle) = Opportunity with an engaged decision maker, available budget, urgency, and you as the preferred vendor. Your reps should be crushing these.
  • Blue zone (in the strike zone but off-center) = Missing one or perhaps even two of the 3 key criteria
  • Chase pitch (way outside the 9 zones in the strike zone) = Missing the key criteria — no engaged DM, no urgency, no confirmed budget.

Of course, many other factors matter too. From the dozens of possible criteria to reference, here are several of the predictive ones that could be used here:

  • Competition & win history
  • Existing vs. new customer
  • Value vs. price buyer
  • Capabilities & fit
  • Timeline alignment
  • Relationship strength & trust
  • Source of the opportunity
  • Projected ROI
  • RFP / bidding situation

A sales version of xBA helps us see whether our salespeople are truly skilled or just lucky right now. A sales zone map helps us predict the real probability of closing — and shows us exactly where to coach.

Sales Close Rate by Qualification Zone map with a bright red Sweet Spot (All Criteria Met) in the center, coral cells labeled Some Criteria Met, and blue cells labeled Most Criteria Missing.

Every salesperson should crush opportunities in the red. The coral-colored cells are a crapshoot. The blue cells (“Most Criteria Missing”) are unlikely to close, even if your best reps are handling the opportunity.

Your top performers focus heavily on Sweet Spot opportunities. Mediocre and weak performers fill their pipelines with coral and blue opportunities, which explains their low win rates.

Using the xBA analogy, Sweet Spot deals have a high expected win rate (xWR). Coral and especially blue deals have a much lower xWR. Salespeople who win coral/blue deals are lucky. Salespeople who lose red deals are unlucky.

If you need help with a custom sales scorecard, pipeline analysis, powerful pipeline reviews, opportunity specific coaching or anything else sales-related, we are always here and ready to jump in. Reach out to us here.

If you like this kind of thinking, here are some other recent mind-blowing pipeline articles:

Sales Cholesterol Reveals If Your Sales Pipeline Is Clogged (And How to Fix It)

Opportunity Blindness – What’s in Your Sales Pipeline?

Revolutionizing Sales Forecasting with a Baseball Twist