How Many Prospects Do We Actually Need to Hit Next Year's Number?

Most revenue targets are set as a single number — grow by a certain amount, or hit a certain total — without anyone working backwards to what actually has to happen in the pipeline to get there. That leaves the sales team guessing whether their current activity is anywhere near enough, usually finding out too late in the year that it was not.

This is a working-backwards exercise using your own real numbers: average order value, win rate and how long a deal typically takes to close. It is not a formula borrowed from an industry benchmark — those vary too much between businesses to be useful — it is arithmetic applied to figures you should already have or can find quickly.

Start with the number you actually need to hit

Take the revenue target for the year and, if useful, split it into new business and repeat business separately, since the two usually need very different pipeline activity to achieve. This article works through the new business portion, because that is the part that depends on prospecting volume rather than existing relationships.

Worked example: from revenue target to number of orders needed

As a worked example only, with figures chosen purely to show the method: suppose a business needs £600,000 in new business revenue next year, and its average new-customer order value is £15,000. That means it needs 40 new orders across the year (£600,000 ÷ £15,000 = 40). Substitute your own real average order value and the number changes completely — the method is what matters, not this figure.

From orders needed to opportunities needed

Orders needed is only useful once you divide it by your actual win rate — the proportion of qualified opportunities that convert to a signed order. If you do not know this number, look back over the last twelve months of genuinely qualified opportunities (not raw enquiries) and count how many became orders. Continuing the example: if this business wins one qualified opportunity in four, it needs 160 qualified opportunities across the year (40 ÷ 0.25 = 160) to produce the 40 orders.

Why win rate matters more than most owners assume

Win rate has an outsized effect on this calculation because it is a division, not a subtraction. In the example above, improving the win rate from one in four to one in three would drop the opportunities required from 160 to 120 — a substantial reduction in prospecting effort for the same revenue target. This is worth stating plainly: sometimes the answer to 'how many more prospects do we need' is genuinely 'none, if we fix conversion instead'.

Spreading opportunities across the sales cycle

The 160 qualified opportunities in the example are not needed all at once — they need to enter the pipeline steadily enough that, given your sales cycle length, they convert into orders spread across the year rather than all landing in December. If this business's typical cycle from qualified opportunity to signed order is four months, opportunities entering the pipeline in January will not close until roughly April or May, and the business needs a steady monthly flow of new opportunities from month one, not a rush in the final quarter.

As a rough illustration only: 160 opportunities spread evenly across twelve months is a little over 13 new qualified opportunities a month. Whether that is realistic depends entirely on how many raw prospects it currently takes to produce one qualified opportunity in your business, which is the next step.

From qualified opportunities back to raw prospects

Not every prospect contacted becomes a qualified opportunity. If your business currently qualifies, say, one contact in five as a genuine opportunity, then 13 qualified opportunities a month requires around 65 prospects contacted a month to sustain it — again, a figure specific to your own funnel, not a benchmark. This is the number worth checking against what your current prospecting activity actually produces.

Where the plan usually breaks down

Most businesses that go through this exercise honestly find one of three things: the win rate assumed in the target was too optimistic, the prospecting volume required is far above what current resource can realistically produce, or the average order value used in the target does not match what is actually being sold. Any of these means the original target needs revisiting — not that everyone should simply try harder.

What to do if the required volume looks unrealistic

If the arithmetic says you need more qualified opportunities a month than your current activity or headcount can plausibly generate, there are only a small number of honest options: extend the timeframe, increase prospecting capacity, improve the win rate so fewer opportunities are needed, or increase average order value through better targeting or pricing. Trying to hit an unrealistic number through effort alone, without changing one of these levers, is the most common reason sales targets are missed with everyone still working hard.

If you are not yet sure which of these problems you actually have, the Sales Help for Founders & Business Owners section covers the related symptoms — a pipeline that looks busy without converting, and how to read the numbers when sales are flat — alongside this one.