Your Pipeline Isn't Too Small: Find Your Leads-to-Close Ratio First

Your pipeline is not too small. It is too honest to survive contact with your forecast.

Every founder I meet asks the same question. How do we get more leads?

Almost nobody asks the question underneath it. How many leads does it actually take us to close one deal?

I have asked that second question in maybe two hundred first meetings over the last three years. Fewer than fifteen people had the number.

Here is why it matters.

If it takes you 50 qualified leads to close a deal, and you want four deals a quarter, you need 200 qualified leads a quarter. That is a plan. You can staff it, budget it, and hold someone to it.

If you do not know the number, every conversation about growth is a conversation about mood.

Only about 27% of the leads handed to sales teams are genuinely qualified. Sales representatives spend well under a third of their week actually selling. Put those two facts side by side and you get the real picture. Most sales teams are not underperforming. They are correctly performing against terrible inputs.

I watched a manufacturing client last year add a second SDR because the pipeline “needed more top of funnel.” Six months later they had double the leads and the same three closures. Their cost per deal had gone up 70%.

Nothing was wrong with the SDR. Everything was wrong with the assumption.

The fix took one afternoon. We pulled twelve months of data, calculated two ratios, and found that 61% of their so-called qualified leads had never had a budget conversation. Not a bad one. None at all.

They did not need more leads. They needed a qualification gate.

The next quarter they ran 40% fewer conversations and closed five deals instead of three.

So before you approve another lead generation budget, go and find your number. Twelve months of data, ninety minutes, one calculation.

If you already know it, you are ahead of most of the market. If you do not, that is the most valuable ninety minutes available to you this month.

Two sales engines, one partner: bookmysales.com

Sources: Salesforce State of Sales, Landbase Lead Qualification Statistics