Guide
This shows you the exact formula for turning a revenue target into a leads-per-month number, including the stages most people forget — quote rate and show rate — with a worked example and a table you can fill in for your own business.
Most owners who feel short of work jump straight to "I need more leads." Sometimes that's true. More often, the leak is somewhere between the phone ringing and the invoice going out. Before you spend money on ads, work out how many leads you actually need, and where you're currently losing them.
Revenue doesn't come straight from leads. It comes from leads that get quoted, quotes that get won, and won jobs where the customer actually shows up (or lets you in). The formula that ties it all together is:
Leads needed = Revenue target ÷ (Average job value × Quote rate × Win rate × Show rate)
Skip either quote rate or show rate and your lead number will be wrong, usually by 20-40%.
Say you want $18,000 a month in revenue. Your average job value is $850. Historically, you quote 70% of leads, win 45% of the quotes you send, and 95% of won jobs actually go ahead as booked.
First, work out jobs needed:
$18,000 ÷ $850 = 21.2, so 21 jobs a month (round up, you can't do a fifth of a job).
Now work backwards through the funnel to find leads:
So: about 70 leads a month to hit $18,000 in revenue at these conversion rates. That's roughly 16 leads a week, or a bit over 2 a day.
Now the interesting bit. Say you're currently missing a chunk of calls, or taking two days to send a quote, and your real quote rate is only 70% because of that — not because the leads are bad, but because you're slow or unreachable.
If you lifted quote rate from 70% to 90% simply by answering the phone properly and quoting faster, the maths changes:
Jobs needed stays at 21. Won jobs needed stays at 22.1. But quotes needed ÷ 0.90 = 24.6. Leads needed = 24.6 ÷ 0.90... wait, quote rate only affects the leads-to-quotes step, so:
22.1 won jobs ÷ 0.45 win rate = 49.1 quotes needed. 49.1 ÷ 0.90 quote rate = 54.6 leads needed.
That's about 55 leads instead of 70 — a saving of roughly 16 leads a month, for the same revenue. If a lead costs you $40 through paid ads or a lead gen platform, those 16 leads would have cost $640 a month. Fixing missed calls costs you the price of a better phone process, an answering service, or call-tracking software — almost always cheaper than $640 a month, and it keeps working every month after. If missed calls are the actual culprit, the missed call revenue calculator will show you what unanswered calls are costing in real terms.
Use this table as a template. Put in your revenue target, then your real average job value and the three conversion rates. Multiply the three rates together, divide the target by (job value × combined rate).
| Revenue target | Avg job value | Quote rate | Win rate | Show rate | Leads needed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $9,000 | $850 | 70% | 45% | 95% | ~35 |
| $18,000 | $850 | 70% | 45% | 95% | ~70 |
| $27,000 | $850 | 70% | 45% | 95% | ~105 |
Notice it scales linearly once your funnel rates are fixed — double the revenue target, double the leads needed. That's exactly why fixing conversion rates matters more as you grow: a 5-point improvement in quote rate saves you proportionally more leads the bigger your target gets.
Don't guess at these percentages. Pull them from whatever you already have:
If you don't track these yet, start with a simple spreadsheet: one row per lead, columns for quoted (Y/N), won (Y/N), completed (Y/N). A month of data gives you real rates instead of guesses.
Before you set a revenue target and work backwards to leads, make sure the target itself covers your costs with room to spare. If $18,000 barely covers overheads and wages, it's not really a growth target, it's survival. Run your fixed and variable costs through the break-even calculator first, then set your revenue target above that line before you calculate leads.
Leads needed = Revenue target ÷ (Average job value × Quote rate × Win rate × Show rate). Get your four inputs from real data, not guesswork. Then look at which stage is leaking the most — often it's quote rate, because it's the cheapest and fastest to fix, and every point you improve there reduces how many leads you have to buy.
The Small Business Operations Kit ($19) turns guides like this one into fill-in-once worksheets: rate card, quoting sheet, job costing, payment terms and follow-up templates. Built by the same people who write these guides.