Tired of relying on guesswork to fill your sales funnel? Not sure how many leads you need in order to hit those lofty sales goals? Leaky funnel got you standing in a puddle of your own sweat and tears? Cool, me neither. Our free sales funnel calculator will show you exactly where the cracks are hiding in your sales process—and arm you with the data to plug all of those holes.
Our nifty calculator here is the product of over a decade of experience leading high growth sales teams. It’s designed to help you visualize every aspect of your sales process, plan for growth, and create opportunities to improve your operations. Really, we just wanna help you make it rain like Wayne.
To use this free sales pipeline calculator today, start by entering all the current sales metrics you have available. This includes your current revenue, growth target, and average ACV at minimum—the more details you can add around existing conversion rates through your funnel, the more actionable insights you’ll get.
Our goal is to empower you to see exactly how many leads you need to generate, predict your future revenue, and see right now whether you need to hire more sales reps (or invest in sales training to level up your team’s game) in order to hit those growth goals.
How to Use Our Sales Funnel Calculator & Template (to Improve Your Sales Process)
This ain’t your grandma’s sales funnel calculator. Unless your grandma drives a souped up sports car. In that case, this is your grandma’s kinda calculator. Just buckle your seatbelt please, there’s a lot goin on here and we want to teach you how to drive this beast.
We built this sales funnel visualization tool not only to show you how much revenue you’ll generate in the months to come, but to give you a more clear roadmap to getting there. We want you to visualize how many leads you’ll need—and see all the nuanced details of how your sales process will need to function in order to reach the next level.
You can use this data to drive real action, create change, and optimize for a higher-converting sales funnel. Here’s how to get started.
Choose Your Revenue Model
Different revenue models have different needs and revenue expectations. You get it, you made it here. We built this calculator to work both with recurring and non-recurring sales models, along with various churn rates. Your first step is to choose your revenue model by selecting the option that matches your current sales model & churn metrics.
Add Your Current Revenue
Next, let’s talk dollars and cents. Add your current monthly revenue, as of the end of last month. Remember, this is how much you’re currently pulling into your business—we’ll get to growth goals in the next step.
Set a Realistic Revenue Growth Target
How fast do you want to grow? Faster, right? Me too. Now, before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s talk about realistic growth. While 100x growth sure sounds nice on paper, you’ll only set yourself (and your boss) up for disappointment by aiming for a finish line 100 miles away if you’re lacing up for your first 5k.
So, what’s a realistic growth goal? Finally, we’re getting personal here. Most high-growth companies aim for somewhere around 40% annual growth while more mature businesses can be excited about 10% annual growth. Your dream growth target may be higher or lower.
Your answer will be unique to your business and the make-up of your sales team. Here’s how to arrive at your ideal revenue growth target:
- Look at Your World: Not the world. Well, I guess the world too. In the big picture, what’s the state of the economy lookin like right now? Is there anything going on that’s likely to materially impact your business? How about zooming into your world—the industry your business operates in. Is demand growing? Shrinking? Stagnating? Do your homework to develop a well-informed sense of what the next year will bring for businesses like yours, and plan your growth accordingly.
- Math Your Sales Activities: Consider what your team can actually accomplish in terms of hitting all the downstream sales activity goals in your sales process like cold calling, taking sales meetings, and final calls to close deals. Can your peeps magically double the number of meetings they’re taking each week? Maybe, maybe not. Probably not. If they can, I need their names and numbers. Ultimately, it’s up to you to sit with the raw numbers & conversion rates along your sales funnel to figure out what will be realistic to improve upon.
Once you’ve set the right growth targets (and consider how sales automation could help along the way), you’re ready to move into the average deal size you’re working with.
Enter Your Average ACV
Now it’s time to add the average annual contract value (ACV) of the leads you hope to close.
Sticking with our theme here today, ACV is another metric that needs to be very realistic in this formula, in order to help you set growth goals you’ll have a chance of achieving. We recommend starting with your current ACV and monitoring as it grows over time. So, if your current ACV is $5,000, don’t just put $10,000 here because you wanna feel something.
You can make this a stretch goal, but keep it reasonable based on where you’re at today.
Set Your Leads to Meetings Rate
How many of your leads eventually make it to a sales meeting? Often referred to as sales qualified leads (SQLs), the metric behind your leads to meeting rate should be either seared into your brain, or blazoned across your CRM’s reporting metrics.
For example, in Close you’ll find your leads to meeting rate inside Reports under Opportunities Funnel. If you’re not sure, see if you can identify the number of unqualified leads that turn into meetings.
Enter Your Number of Sales Reps Today
This one is easy. How many people on your team are focused on selling?
Right out the gate, this will show you whether your revenue growth goals are reasonable with your current team—or if you’ll need to hire more reps. For example, if you want to go from $150,000 to $500,000 in monthly revenue, you’ll likely need another team member… or ten.
Choose Your Meetings to Opportunities Rate
How often does a meeting lead to a qualified opportunity for your sales team?
To calculate this figure yourself, compare the percentage of meetings hosted, to the overall qualified opportunities your team logs after their first meetings. Ideally, this figure is sitting in your CRM software of choice, but you may have to get this one manually.
The goal here is to see how effective your sales team is at turning phone calls (or scheduled meetings) into actual opportunities with a strong likelihood of closing.
Add Your Estimated Close Rate
How effective are you at converting leads into paying customers?
This calculation is very straightforward—the percentage of leads you expect to actually convert to customers. This is a key metric for monitoring healthy sales pipeline management, and it’ll help you see how many leads and meetings your team needs in order to reach your growth goals.
What’s Your Self-Serve Rate?
Finally, if you have some customers that convert without chatting to sales, you’ll want to add your self-serve rate. These folks know what they want, and they’re ready to sign. Knowing this rate helps you account for the sales that don’t draw on your sales team’s resources.
If the answer is none, add 0. If you’re unsure, dig into your CRM’s sales data and compare the number of deals your sales team closed last month, with the total number of sales during that same period.
Once you’ve entered all your data, our handy calculator is going to run the numbers and give you some pretty great sales insights, including:
- How many sales reps you need to hit your sales goals
- How many leads you need to bring in each month
- How many meetings each rep needs to be holding
- How many qualified opportunities you’ll want
- The monthly revenue benchmarks required to hit your ultimate sales goal
The best part about this calculator, is that it visually shows you the impact of making specific changes across your sales funnel. For example, if your current closing rate is low, what happens when you bump it up a few percentage points? If your team turns just 1% more meetings into opportunities, what happens to your revenue?
The ability to see the immediate impact of moving just a few metrics is really helpful at planning for the future and identifying exactly where to focus your efforts.
Last but not least, you can download all this sales funnel data into a CSV. If you upload it to Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or your favorite data analysis tools, you’ll be able to play around with the numbers even more.
Who’s this Sales Funnel Calculator Built for?
The real ones. We built this free tool for you. If you’re here, you care about improving your sales process—and for that reason (plus many more), we care about helping you do that.
This sales funnel calculator is designed to be most useful for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) of all kinds. From startups to wedding planners, real estate agents, and plumbers, we help thousands of motivated business owners & sales pros to grow their revenue faster.
If you have a tech-enabled sales team using tools like our robust CRM, you’ll be able to get the most out of taking action on these insights by unlocking the advantages of sales automation across your funnel.
Whether you're a startup, a growing business, or an established company, this free tool will shine a light on your sales pipeline, help you forecast revenue growth, and make more informed decisions. If you care about creating sustainable growth and maximizing your team’s sales performance, this calculator is your flashlight on a dark night.
Frequently Asked Questions About Sales Funnels (FAQs)
Have questions about building a sales process that’ll grow to the next level? Fear not, we’ve got answers from decades of collective sales experience up in here.
What are the four stages of a sales funnel?
A typical sales funnel consists of four main stages:
- Prospecting: Salespeople identify potential leads and make initial contact. Qualification at this stage is very limited, but ideally your team is prospecting in a pool with a lot of potential.
- Qualification: Leads are assessed to determine how likely they are to become customers, based on demographics, psychographics, and needs. Your qualification process is designed to make the rest of your sales process flow seamlessly.
- Proposal and Presentation: Depending upon what you’re selling, the proposal process can be anything from a time-consuming research endeavor, to a quick reference on your pricing sheet. Whichever your business model, presenting your product or service to qualified leads always involves addressing specific pain points and meeting their objections.
- Closing: Hold your horses, closing is a process. There’s an art to nailing your close after you’ve overcome your lead’s objections—and only then is it the right time to ask for the sale. By the end of stage, any negotiations are finalized, contracts are signed, and the sale is officially complete.
Some sales teams add more steps into their sales funnel stages based on the nuances of their business. There’s no right or wrong way to split up your sales stages—use what works best for you, your team, and the process you want to build on.
How do you calculate a sales funnel?
Calculating the output from your sales pipeline involves estimating the potential revenue that can be generated from existing leads in each stage of your funnel. By multiplying the expected value of each deal by the probability of it closing, you can forecast the potential revenue of your pipeline. Alternatively, by using your desired revenue target as the starting point, you can back out the number of leads you’ll need to enter your funnel in order to reach your goal.
How do you build a healthy sales funnel?
Improving the health of your sales funnel requires a proactive approach to both lead generation that fuels the top of your funnel—and continuous refinement of every step in your sales process. Focus on lead quality over quantity, ensuring that leads align with your ideal customer profile.
Experiment with different lead nurturing strategies to keep potential customers engaged and informed throughout their journey. Regularly review and analyze data to identify bottlenecks, optimize your sales process, and prioritize high-value leads.
Finally, invest in properly training your team and equipping them with powerful sales tools like a CRM to automate repetitive tasks and free them up to focus on closing more deals.
