Guesswork is so basic.

The Lead Forecasting Calculator was designed to estimate how many new-to-database (NTD or NTDB) leads you would need to generate in order to meet a specific revenue goal. This tool can be used to plan leads for the entire year, or could be used to plan a specific campaign.

Since each month has a different number of days, the leads needed during any given month are distributed as a daily average multiplied by the number of days in the month.

In order to ensure your revenue goal is met within your date range, the leads are generated from your Start Date to the Last Day to Generate Leads. Last day to generate leads is the date calculated from your End Date minus your Days to Convert and your Days to Close Deal.

Leads are no longer included after the "Last Day to Generate Leads" date because the Days to Convert and the Days to Close Deal would be more than the time left before the end date. Since the calculator generates the number of leads you'd need to satisfy your goal and ensures that revenue is generated by the End Date, new leads aren't needed while the rest are mid-opportunity.

Within your CRM, you can find your NTD to MQL conversion percentage by dividing your MQL count by your total number of leads sourced by marketing. Keep in mind create dates when considering which totals and MQLs to use for this conversion percentage. You can also find your MQL to CW ratio by locating all Contacts associated with Closed Won Opportunities. Then, you can query your Contact history to find the percentage of those associate contacts who were flagged as MQLs before converting into Contacts. This approach will vary depending on which CRM you use and how your organization has tracked data for a lead quality of MQL.

Often, organizations track Lead data and Opportunity data in separate locations and teams. Days to Convert will be a metric tracked on Leads, and should be determined by creation date to the date they converted into a Contact. Days to Close Deal will be a metric tracked on Opportunities, and should be determined by opportunity creation date to the date that the Opportunity Stage turned into Closed Won. Usually, this can be found in an Opportunity report filtered to "Closed Won" only with the "Last Stage Change Date" or "Close Date" indicating the final date.

Lead distribution should be considered when your business has a busy season, a quiet season, or if there are particular months or weeks where you anticipate generating more leads than average (such as a busy event month). This will help to create a more realistic picture of what you should plan around for lead generation month over month.

Now that you've planned your leads that you'll need for your date range, some tactics to generate more leads include: splitting up a larger, existing piece of content to generate smaller downloadable content pieces, hosting webinars to generate registrations, or using a demand gen partner (like Digitalzone) to amplify your content across a new database.