The CEO just handed you down the revenue goal and you have to hit the goal by year end. Your confidence aside, is there a more systematic way to ensure you meet your target month to month and sustain growth?

By knowing how many leads you need, not just in each month, but per stage in your sales funnel, you and the sales and marketing teams would be more aligned with your objective. To do this you need to reverse engineer your revenue goals and break them down by number of leads per sales stage. In this article we’ll walk you through the steps on how to do this.

With this process, you’ll have more control over your sales funnel and, perhaps, avoid the common problem of 60% of forecasted deals not closing that many sales managers face today.

Likewise, you will avoid scrambling for more leads at the tailend of the year, since the sales funnel shows how far behind you are right off the first quarter. This graph from Going.io indicates that sales reps often scramble for leads in the last two quarters, perhaps the only time they realize how much they’re off the mark and their profit compromised.