How to calculate your monthly lead generation goal

Managing leads in a business is not a simple task. After all, it’s not enough to attract and convert them — you also need to keep track of your team’s performance and know what needs to be done in the upcoming months.

Therefore, it is necessary to establish a lead generation goal: the goal your marketing team should achieve until the next evaluation.

Keep in mind that just because you had a high number of leads in a month, it doesn’t necessarily mean that this number needs to be even higher in the next one.

To define your goals precisely, you need to consider many factors. But do you know which ones? Keep on reading, and you’ll find out:

• What is a lead generation goal?
• What is the importance of a precise and realistic calculation?
• What are the steps to calculating your lead generation goal?

How about, then, going deeper into the topic and finding out exactly what to ask from your team? 

What is a lead generation goal?

A lead generation goal is the precise definition of the total number of potential customers to be generated by your team. 

That is the expected result achieved by marketing professionals in a given period since they have the necessary resources, strategies, and tools.

As in any Digital Marketing action, monitoring and accuracy should be a priority in searching for long-term success. 

Therefore, if you want to have satisfying results, the first step is to create realistic goals. This is also true when it comes to generating leads through your online strategies and actions.

The lead generation goal, then, establishes the metrics on which your team should focus. In this sense, it is important that the numbers are reachable and that the expected results are aligned with your company’s growth strategy.

The importance of having a lead generation goal lies in being fair when it comes to evaluating your team’s performance. 

At the same time, it is a way to value the resources available in the pursuit of goals that will contribute to the organization’s success.

What is the importance of a precise and realistic calculation?

Having a north is critical to the success of any strategy. It is no different for the work of attraction and lead generation: without a goal to be achieved, the tendency is that the tasks are not performed precisely.

In other words, be it lower or higher, making mistakes in the definition of your lead generation goal will damage your team’s work routine. 

In the long run, this will lead to unsatisfactory performance — after all, the results will not match what is expected.

If the team generates fewer leads than what is necessary, conversions will not be enough. Even if the conversion rate is excellent, will the total of new customers be enough for the company’s expected revenue?

Moreover, it puts pressure on the sellers, who will need to convert even more with fewer contacts at their disposal. If the goal is far above what is possible to achieve, other problems will come up.

The first is your team’s demotivation as they realize they’re far from achieving the proposed goals, which can result in a sharp drop in performance. 

At the same time, it will cause inaccurate evaluations of the professionals’ performance and the strategy, creating a picture that is not realistic.

What are the steps to calculating your lead generation goal?

The key to finding the ideal goal for your team is to start the work from the end. 

Find out how much revenue your company needs to generate — or what part of it is your team’s responsibility — and make some simple calculations to get to the beginning: the necessary lead generation goal.

Step 1: Find out what the expected revenue is

The first step is to listen to other professionals’ opinions to define how many leads should be generated. 

So, talk to the managers and the sales team to determine their objectives and goals about the expected revenue.

It is also important to know how much revenue should come from Inbound Marketing. 

For example, your company needs to generate US$ 100.000,00 of revenue, and 80% of this total should come from the Inbound strategy. Therefore:

• US$ 100.000 x 0.8 = US$ 80.000 of revenue generated through Inbound Marketing.

Step 2: Find out how many clients are required to achieve this goal

Next, you need to estimate how many clients will be necessary to reach this goal. 

To do this, you will need to divide the number found in the first step by the average ticket of your product or the average revenue generated by each customer.

Following our example, let’s suppose that each client spends, on average, US$ 16.000 on contracts with your company. Therefore:

• US$ 80.000 / US$ 16.000 on average ticket = 5 clients

This means that your sales team will need to close approximately 5 deals to reach the goal set up by the Inbound strategy.

Step 3: Find out how many leads it will take to sign this many contracts

Now, you will need one more information: your lead conversion rate. That is, of the last leads generated by your team, how many became customers? If you don’t have enough data to calculate that number, you can set an “optimal rate”.

However, remember to keep your feet on the ground! Projecting that you will convert 50% of your leads into customers, for example, is highly unrealistic. 

Go for something around 2 or 3%, especially if you still don’t have enough data to go from.

To make it clearer, let’s say you convert 2% of your leads into customers. The equation looks like this:

• 5 customers / 0.02 conversion rate = 250 leads

That’s it! You have reached the number of leads you need to generate. But take your time, we haven’t reached the end of this equation yet.

Step 4: Adjust your goal, so it reflects the progress made in the previous months

Of course, you will only do this if you have been generating leads for a longer period. 

If that is not your case, you can project an expected growth rate until you have enough data to use as a base for the calculations.

This step is very important to keep you focused and with your head in the right place. 

It’s no use thinking that because you’ve generated 15 leads in one month, you’ll generate ten times as many in the next. 

That is not going to happen. You should be sensible and willing to adapt to other metrics.

A well-structured Content Marketing strategy will generate thousands of leads every month, but it will need some time to catch traction and reach its potential.

Organic ranking with efficient SEO work, for example, will not increase traffic on your pages overnight. 

Remember: the growth needs to be sustainable.

As we mentioned, having unreachable goals can be demotivating for your team. 

Failing often and not reaching the expected results will create a bad work environment for everyone. So, adapt your goals to your current reality — no matter how high the numbers get.

On the other hand, don’t be too condescending and create a false sense of security by demanding fewer leads than you should from your team.

After all, your company will end up performing below what is necessary, and, in the long term, this will cause it to lose its space in a competitive market.

Step 5: Keep track of the results (and create graphs for better data visualization)

As with everything in your content strategy, you should follow the results closely. 

This way, you’ll be able to identify the actions that have the best results and should be replicated, as well as change those that haven’t been so successful or need to be improved.

To optimize this work, graphs can be very useful. Marketing automation tools such as HubSpot and Marketo already deliver these charts in an automated way — and the best part: they allow comparisons with previous months.

With a well-defined lead generation goal, the expectations created are exactly those that can be met by your team. At the same time, it’s a way of not undermining your business with a low number that wouldn’t lead to the expected amount of sales.

Now that you know how to set a lead generation goal and how important it is for your team’s success, what about learning how to qualify those contacts? Check out our step-by-step guide on lead qualification!