How many leads for one customer? The funnel in records
Auspector ·
Nobody can sell you “the” conversion rate — yours come from your own history. The arithmetic, though, is fixed: records, reached, spoken, quoted, customer. With the illustrative rates in this article (reach 40 %, conversation 50 %, quote 30 %, close 20 %), one thousand records yield 12 customers — about 84 records per customer — and a target of 5 new customers a month points at roughly 420 records a month.
Why the question is asked backwards
“How big a list do I need?” has no single answer, because it is really three questions: how many customers you want, what your own conversion rates are, and how many records sit behind each customer those rates produce. Work the chain backwards and the list size stops being a guess.
The five stages, and whose numbers they are
Five stages, and only the first is the supplier’s to state. Records: the filtered list — category, area, arrival window. Reached: records you actually contact, by phone, visit or letter. Spoken: a real conversation happened. Quote: a price left your hands. Customer: they said yes. The four rates between them are yours — from your last quarter, your team, your script — and no supplier’s average replaces them.
A worked example, labelled as one
| Stage | Example figure | What the step assumes |
|---|---|---|
| Records you start from | 1,000 | The filtered list: your category, your area, your window |
| Reached | 400 | Example: you contact 40 % of the records over the month |
| Spoke or met | 200 | Example: half of those reached turn into a real conversation |
| Quote sent | 60 | Example: 30 % of conversations produce a quote |
| New customers | 12 | Example: 20 % of quotes close |
Read the same table upwards and it answers the real question: one customer costs about 84 records at the example rates, so a target of 5 new customers a month points at roughly 420 records a month in your filter. Your rates will differ; the multiplication does not.
Turning the count into credits
Credits enter at one point only: opening the records you decide to work. Planning and sizing the list is free — search and counts are unlimited on every plan — so you can run this whole calculation before spending anything. When you do open, one credit opens one newly opened record or five established ones, an export counts as an open, and a record opened once never costs a credit again. Prices live on the pricing page.
Two corrections before you trust any version
Two corrections keep the arithmetic honest. First, records are places, not people: a chain’s branches and a service operator’s coverage areas inflate the top of the funnel — unique phone numbers, not filled fields, are the honest unit. Second, new records decay: the window holds thirty days, so a monthly target needs a monthly refresh, not a one-off download. How the filter itself is built, step by step, is in building a lead list from new businesses, and how many records a territory produces each month in sizing a sales territory.