How many leads does that target need?
Working backwards from revenue through win rate, acceptance and lead conversion usually reveals a number nobody had put on the plan.
Your numbers
New business only, not renewals.
First-year contract value.
Sales-qualified opportunities that close.
Below 25% usually means the MQL definition is wrong.
Blended across channels.
First touch to closed-won.
Leads required
6,764
564 per month to close 63 deals.
Media spend implied
$574,946
At $85 per lead.
Acquisition cost per deal
$9,199
38% of first-year value — media only, before sales cost.
Lead to closed-won
0.92%
End to end. Track this, not the individual stage rates.
Pipeline lead time
2.4 mo
How far ahead leads must arrive to land in period.
At $9,199 per deal — 38% of first-year value before a single salesperson is paid — this model does not work as stated. Improving the 35% acceptance rate is usually the cheapest lever, because it multiplies through every stage above it: a stricter, jointly-agreed definition typically cuts lead volume and raises revenue at the same time.
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The maths, so it isn't a black box.
It inverts the funnel
Revenue target divided by deal value gives the deals needed; dividing successively by win rate, acceptance rate and lead conversion gives the lead volume behind them. Each stage multiplies, which is why a small change in acceptance rate moves the top of the funnel so violently.
It prices the media against the deal
Lead volume times cost per lead gives the spend, and spend divided by deals gives acquisition cost per customer. Expressed as a share of first-year deal value, that is the number that tells you whether the plan is fundable before sales cost is added.
It reports the end-to-end rate
Lead to closed-won as a single percentage. This is the figure worth tracking over time — individual stage rates move for definitional reasons, but the end-to-end number is hard to argue with.
And it surfaces the lead time nobody plans for
Pipeline has to be created a full sales cycle before the revenue is needed. With a long cycle, leads arriving late in the year cannot close inside it, which means the annual target was arithmetically unreachable before the year started.
Questions about this calculation
It multiplies through everything above it, which is why it is usually the cheapest thing to fix. Raising MQL-to-SQL acceptance from 20% to 35% cuts required lead volume by more than 40% at the same revenue target. In most cases that is a definition problem rather than a lead-quality problem — marketing is optimising toward a threshold that does not predict revenue, and correcting it reduces lead count while increasing pipeline.
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