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The Pipeline Calculator
How many leads do you actually need to hit your revenue target? Thirty seconds of boring maths most businesses never do.
= — new customers a year
= roughly — real conversations a month
Want the full breakdown? How to actually generate that many leads, mapped to your numbers, free in the Letters.
How the maths works
Customers needed = revenue target ÷ average customer value.
Leads needed = customers needed ÷ close rate.
Per month = that number ÷ 12, rounded up, because pipeline doesn't care about your December.
One opinion baked in: your close-rate guess is probably optimistic. Sales-qualified close rates for small B2B firms usually sit well below what owners remember, run the maths twice, once with your guess and once with half of it. The truth is usually in between.
Fair questions
How many leads does a small business need per month?
There's no universal number: it's your revenue target divided by customer value, divided by close rate. That's exactly what this calculator does. For most small B2B firms it lands somewhere between 5 and 50 a month, which is usually far more than their current marketing produces.
What's a realistic close rate for B2B?
From enquiry to customer, most small B2B service firms genuinely close somewhere between 10% and 30%. If you're above that, your leads are mostly referrals, which is exactly the dependency this maths is meant to expose.