How many leads per month does a company with 200 employees need?

Exactly a week ago, I published a survey with the title question. 92 people took part in it. More than half, 55%, voted that a company with 200 employees needs about 100 leads per month to achieve its sales goals. The next two answers achieved very similar percentage values between 22 and 23%.
 

Several comments also emerged. Some suggested that the question was asked improperly, others that these are issues dependent on many factors such as the number of salespeople, the cost per lead, or the size of the market. 

When it comes to B2B, it all depends on your industry and target audience. However, using data from the HubSpot comparison report, we are able to indicate an approximate number of potential customers. The correct answer to the survey question is, of course, 100 leads, and I am glad that more than half of the survey participants are aware of this.

These are only estimated figures. Around 4-7% of companies would need more leads to achieve their revenue goals than is indicated in the table. It may turn out that a company employing 1-200 employees will need even 150-200 leads, and this is completely normal.

Up to 70% of companies fail to reach their revenue goal because they generate less than 50% of the necessary potential customers.

The reason is a lack of understanding of the correlation between the average selling price, marketing costs, and all other elements that ultimately make up the sale. So let's start from the basics. If you want to acquire 50 customers per month, and your sales department has a conversion rate of 10-15%, you need 334 to 500 sales leads per month. The benchmark is a 10% conversion rate, so out of 1000 leads received in a year, 100 of them will be worth contacting the sales department. If we can reach 80% of them, we will talk to 80 potential customers.

Out of those conversations, how many will result in moving on to discussing the details of the offer? Assuming it's 50%, we will have 40 more detailed sales talks. If we successfully complete this stage, we will move on to preparing the offer. Assuming that 75% of customers will request an offer after the conversation, we will send it to 30 people.

Because we effectively carry out our sales process, 80% of customers will ultimately accept our offer. So we finish the entire sales process at the level of 24 contracts from 1000 leads obtained (1000 may seem like a large number, but it's a few leads per day, of various quality and qualification). If our annual sales goal was 240000 PLN, and one customer brings in 10,000 income per year, then 1000 generated leads will meet our sales goal.

Converting from a lead to a final transaction takes a lot of time and effort. It's a job that requires optimization and reflection each month. For each case, an individual approach is necessary. Of course, there are industries that will never benefit from generating sales leads and others that will secure work for a year to come by obtaining just one valuable lead.