
Hello and welcome to Marketing Snacks: a weekly newsletter from exitfive where we source practical, tactical, insights from brilliant marketers across the web.
We hope you enjoy, let's dig in.
🍿 Today's Snack 🍦
Pipeline Coverage: How To Get Started Quickly
If you only report on leads and opportunities, you'll miss an important step of understanding how well marketing's work is turning into revenue.
Pipeline is a very important leading indicator of opportunity quality, and whether or not you're on track to hit goals later down the funnel.
A lot of companies wait too long to start using pipeline. But you can (read: should) start as soon as you're driving leads/sending them to sales/owning a rev number.
A simple model looks like this:
- How much revenue do we need to drive?
- $1,000,000
- What's your close rate?
- If 25%, then you'll need 4x pipe coverage to hit $1,000,000
- If you don't have good data, use 3-5x as a first pass and adjust over time
- What's your ACV?
- If it's $100,000, you need 10 deals closed-won, and 40 legit opps (sometimes it pays to inflate coverage here)
- What % of revenue are marketing/sales agreeing to drive separately?
- If it's a 50:50 split, marketing needs to source 20 opps
- What is your lead to opp conversion rate?
- If 25% of leads become opps, you need to drive 80 leads
If this^ is for a quarter, divide into monthly goals:

These are all fake numbers of course, and each business will be different, but hopefully you can see here that it's not so hard to back into a model that will work.
I know the argument against this: We don't have the data. Great - start collecting it today and you'll have enough information very soon to have a good handle on this stuff.
In my experience, you can get a starting point with a month or a quarter's worth of data...and if you have to build your first systems in google sheets, it still works.
It can be infinitely more complicated: factoring in time-to-close, different close rates of different channels, etc etc.
The main point is, just start somewhere. It's a new year, let it rip.
Check out the post here (+ below), and give Kyle a follow if you liked this snack.

PS. Want to submit a Snack? Reply back to this email and pitch your wisdom. We'd love to feature you.
