Forecast leads, MQLs, SQLs, customers, cost per lead, and CAC for your B2B funnel — using your real traffic, conversion rates, and marketing spend.
Lead generation is the marketing discipline of turning anonymous attention into identifiable contacts your sales team can pursue. The maths is simple multiplication: monthly traffic times your visitor-to-lead rate gives you leads, then each downstream conversion rate compounds to MQLs, SQLs, and customers. The numbers tell you whether your funnel is working — and crucially, whether your spend can produce enough customers to justify the investment.
For B2B, lead generation is almost always a multi-touch journey. Buyers research independently, fill a form weeks before they're ready to talk to sales, and bounce between content and competitors before deciding. This calculator simplifies all of that into a single steady-state model — useful for planning, less useful for any individual lead's actual path.
The full funnel calculation has four conversion stages, each multiplied against the prior:
Monthly Leads = Traffic × Visitor→Lead %
Monthly MQLs = Leads × Lead→MQL %
Monthly SQLs = MQLs × MQL→SQL %
Monthly Customers = SQLs × SQL→Customer %
Monthly Revenue = Customers × Average Deal Value
Cost per Lead = Spend / Leads
CAC = Spend / Customers
Marketing ROI % = (Revenue − Spend) / Spend × 100Each stage has its own benchmark band (covered below). The single biggest lever isn't usually the visitor-to-lead rate — it's the SQL-to-customer rate, since improvements here multiply through every stage above.
Here are the lead generation KPIs we use to assess B2B funnel health, drawn from First Page Sage, HubSpot, and Salesforce industry data:
| Stage | Good | Average | Needs work |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visitor → lead | >3% | 1.5–3% | <1.5% |
| Lead → MQL | >40% | 25–40% | <25% |
| MQL → SQL | >50% | 30–50% | <30% |
| SQL → customer | >30% | 15–30% | <15% |
| Cost per lead (B2B) | <$100 | $100–$300 | >$500 |
| LTV : CAC ratio | >3:1 | 1.5–3:1 | <1.5:1 |
Three levers move lead volume faster than spend. First, conversion rate optimisation on the highest-traffic pages — a CRO win on a page receiving 5,000 visits a month at 2% conversion is mathematically more valuable than acquiring another 2,000 visits. Second, channel mix: organic search and referrals typically produce 3–5x cheaper leads than paid social, so reallocating a quarter of paid budget into content can move CPL down meaningfully. Third, offer testing — a useful free tool, calculator, or industry report routinely outperforms a gated whitepaper by 3–5x at the same traffic level.
If your visitor-to-lead conversion rate is below 2%, start there. Anything above 4% is unusual for B2B and worth protecting before you push for more.
Forecasting tells you what lead generation should produce; measurement tells you what it actually did. The difference is which inputs you use — projected versus actual.
Four metrics belong on every lead generation dashboard:
If you can't attribute leads to specific channels in your CRM, that's the first thing to fix. Without it, every optimisation decision is a guess.
This is a lead generation calculator — it measures capture, not creation. If your problem is that nobody knows your category exists, the answer isn't a better landing page; it's demand creation through content, podcasts, and PR that build category awareness before anyone is ready to buy.
Demand generation produces traffic; lead generation converts it. Both feed into this calculator as inputs — traffic for demand, conversion rates for lead capture — but they're separate disciplines with separate budgets and separate teams in most mature B2B organisations.
You calculate lead generation by multiplying monthly website traffic by your visitor-to-lead conversion rate. To go further down the funnel, multiply leads by your lead-to-MQL rate, then MQL-to-SQL, then SQL-to-customer. This calculator does all four steps and adds cost-per-lead and ROI on top. The formula is: Leads = Traffic × Conversion Rate. Everything else is just the same logic applied to the next funnel stage.
The four metrics that matter for measuring lead generation are: leads per month, cost per lead (CPL), lead-to-customer conversion rate, and customer acquisition cost (CAC). Most teams track leads in isolation, which is misleading — a programme generating 1,000 cheap leads that don't convert is worse than one generating 100 expensive leads that do. Always pair volume metrics with quality metrics from your CRM.
For B2B, a healthy lead generation programme produces a cost per lead (CPL) of $50–$300 depending on industry, a lead-to-MQL rate of 25–40%, an MQL-to-SQL rate of 30–50%, and an SQL-to-customer rate of 15–30%. The single most important KPI is cost per customer (CAC), since it tells you whether the whole funnel makes economic sense. CPL on its own is misleading without a conversion rate to anchor it.
Demand generation creates awareness and interest in your category before anyone is ready to buy — through content, podcasts, paid social, organic search, and PR. Lead generation captures that interest as identifiable contacts who can be nurtured and sold to. Demand gen feeds the top of the funnel; lead gen converts attention into pipeline. The two are sequential, not alternatives — you need both, and they share the same calculator inputs.
Three levers move lead volume faster than budget: conversion rate optimisation on the highest-traffic landing pages, channel mix shifts toward lower-CPL channels (organic search and referrals typically beat paid), and offer testing (a free tool, calculator, or report often outperforms a gated PDF by 3–5x). If your visitor-to-lead conversion rate is below 2%, that's usually the cheapest place to start.
For most B2B companies with ACVs above $5,000, yes — provided cost per customer (CAC) stays below one-third of customer lifetime value (LTV). The 3:1 LTV:CAC ratio is the standard threshold. Lead generation becomes uneconomic when sales cycles are very short and ACVs are very low (where word-of-mouth beats paid acquisition), or when you're selling to a category that doesn't search yet (where demand creation matters more than capture).
You automate lead generation by combining four systems: forms that route to your CRM automatically, lead scoring that prioritises sales-ready leads, nurture sequences that warm up not-yet-ready leads, and enrichment tools (Clearbit, ZoomInfo, Apollo) that fill in firmographic data. The goal isn't to remove humans — it's to make sure no lead waits more than 5 minutes for a response and no MQL goes un-nurtured.
Outbound lead generation is the practice of identifying potential buyers and contacting them directly — typically through cold email, LinkedIn outreach, or phone calls — rather than waiting for them to find you. Modern outbound runs on enriched lists (Apollo, Clay, ZoomInfo), highly personalised sequences, and tight ICP targeting. It works best for high-ACV B2B where you can afford 1:1 personalisation and the buyer universe is small enough to research.
Demandloft's team builds funnel forecasts for free as part of every B2B demand gen scoping call — using your real channel mix, your CRM data, and your actual conversion rates. Takes about 30 minutes.
Book a scoping call →