Most people start this calculation at the wrong end. They ask how many emails to send, pick a number that sounds brave, and find out in month four whether it was enough.
Run it the other way and it takes four lines:
- Revenue target divided by your average contract value gives you deals.
- Deals divided by your close rate gives you meetings held.
- Meetings held divided by your show-up rate gives you meetings booked.
- Meetings booked multiplied by 150 to 300 gives you people contacted.
That last multiplier is the one nobody wants to believe, so the rest of this post is where it comes from, how to sanity check it against published data, and the two places the chain snaps. It assumes outbound is the right engine for your company in the first place, which is a separate question with a real answer.
Put your own numbers in, and be honest about the close rate
I will use round figures so the arithmetic stays readable. A 300,000 target for the year, an average contract of 15,000. These are placeholders, not anybody's real numbers, and the whole point is that you swap yours in.
300,000 divided by 15,000 is 20 deals.
Now the close rate, which is where the plan usually goes wrong. Use what actually happened last year, counted properly: signed contracts divided by first meetings held, not by proposals sent. If ten first meetings produced two clients, your rate is 20%.
20 deals at a 20% close rate needs 100 meetings held.
One warning here, because I watch this cost people a year. If your closing is weak at four meetings a month, it gets weaker at twenty. More calls means less preparation per call, more prospects who are early, more people who took the meeting out of politeness. Volume does not repair a sales process, it exposes it. Plan with a close rate slightly below the one you have, never above.
Booked and held are not the same number
Some of the people who accept a meeting will not turn up. For cold-sourced leads the gap is real, and of everything in this chain it is the cheapest to improve.
Assume 75% show up, purely so the example keeps moving. That is my placeholder, not a benchmark, and yours will be different. At 75%, 100 meetings held needs about 133 booked. That is 11 a month, every month, with no quiet December.
If you have never measured your own show rate, measure it this month before you plan anything on top of it. Why cold-sourced calls often run below my placeholder, and what moves the number, is covered in how to cut no shows on cold-sourced calls.
The multiplier from contacts to booked meetings
Here is the number the whole plan rests on.
Across the funnels I have measured, it takes roughly 150 to 250 people contacted to produce one booked call. In a different type of campaign, contacting 10,000 people in a month produces something like 30 to 35 calls, which works out closer to 300 per call.
So the honest range is 150 to 300, and where you land inside it depends on your market, your offer and how well known you are before you arrive.
133 booked meetings a year at that rate means 20,000 to 40,000 people contacted. Call it 1,700 to 3,300 a month.
Two things about that number.
First, "contacted" does not mean "one email sent". Landing a first meeting takes eight touches on average in RAIN Group's research, so each contact is a whole sequence and your sending volume is several times your contact count.
Second, that is a lot of people, and for most small B2B companies the list is the binding constraint long before the copy is. If your entire addressable market is 4,000 companies with two relevant people in each, you cannot contact 30,000 people a year without going around the same names nearly four times. That is a market-size problem, and it is worth reading how to pick a market you can actually sell into before you accept the target.
Two ways to check the chain before you trust it
Cross-check one: end-to-end conversion. Published B2B SaaS benchmarks put visitor-to-close conversion at 1.0% to 1.8%, with top-decile companies over 6%. Run my chain and 20 deals from 20,000 to 40,000 contacts comes out at 0.05 to 0.1%.
That is a gap of ten times or more, and papering over it would make this page useless. My reading is that those benchmarks are measuring a website visitor, someone who arrived on their own, often through inbound or search, while my multiplier counts cold strangers on a list who never came looking. If you plan with the optimistic version and the pessimistic version is true, you discover it in month nine with the year gone. Plan with the conservative number until your own campaigns give you a better one, then throw mine away.
Cross-check two: the price of a meeting. The most careful benchmark write-up I found on this says plainly there is no credible universal figure, then works a single in-house rep's fully loaded cost from roughly $600 to nearly $2,000 a meeting, with nothing changing except how many meetings that rep books in a month. Multiply your booked-meeting number by that range and 133 meetings a year lands somewhere between roughly 80,000 and 260,000 against a 300,000 target.
You do not have to accept those figures. You do have to accept that the meetings have a cost, whether you pay it in fees, in salary, or in your own evenings, and that the cost moves with how efficiently they get produced.
Where the arithmetic snaps
Two places, both predictable.
The average contract value is a story rather than a measurement. Founders quote the biggest deal they ever signed. Take last year's signed contracts, add them up, divide by the count, and use that. If the real average is 8,000 rather than 15,000, every number downstream nearly doubles and the plan you were about to fund is half a plan.
The close rate is borrowed from a good quarter. Same fix. Use the twelve-month number, and remember it drops under volume.
Numbers at the other extreme exist too, and it helps to know they do: one client of ours booked 119 sales meetings in 14 days. That happens when the offer, the proof and the sending capacity are all already built, and it is not the number to plan your first year around.
What the number is actually for
The point of running this backwards is that it turns a wish into a testable claim, and it fails fast.
If 300,000 requires 30,000 people contacted and your market holds 6,000 companies, the target is wrong or the offer is wrong. Better to know that in week one than in month nine. If it requires 1,800 a month and you are currently doing 200, you now know the gap is capacity, and no subject line rewrite closes it.
And if the arithmetic works out fine on paper, run it again with a close rate two points lower and a show rate ten points lower. If the plan survives that, it is a plan. What happens after the meeting is booked is a separate discipline, and it is where most of this value gets lost: the part that comes after the call is booked is worth reading next.
Open a spreadsheet. Four lines. Twenty minutes.