Sales Pipeline Leak Evaluator
Find the stage where your pipeline is bleeding the most deals.
Your weakest link is Opp → Win at 28%. Lifting the lowest stage a few points compounds through every stage below it, fix the leak, don't just pour in more leads.
Overall lead-to-win is the product of every stage, so a single weak conversion caps the whole funnel regardless of top-of-funnel volume.
About this calculator
Total lead-to-win rate hides where a funnel actually breaks. A pipeline can look fine in aggregate while one stage, often MQL→SQL or SQL→Opportunity, is quietly capping everything downstream. This calculator walks a lead volume through four stage conversion rates and flags the single weakest link, because fixing that one stage compounds through every stage below it.
How to use it
- Enter monthly leads at the top of funnel, and the four stage conversion rates: lead→MQL, MQL→SQL, SQL→opportunity, opportunity→win.
- Read the volume surviving at each stage, MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, and won deals.
- Check the verdict for your weakest stage, the lowest conversion rate among the four you entered.
- Prioritize fixing that stage before adding more top-of-funnel leads, since a weak stage caps everything that flows through it regardless of volume.
Methodology
Each stage multiplies the surviving volume from the stage above by that stage's conversion rate: MQLs = leads × lead→MQL rate, SQLs = MQLs × MQL→SQL rate, and so on through opportunities and wins.
Overall lead-to-win rate is the product of all four stage rates, not their average. A single weak stage caps the whole chain: a funnel with three 50% stages and one 10% stage converts at roughly the same overall rate as a funnel where every stage is 10%.
The "weakest link" flagged in the verdict is simply the lowest of the four rates entered. It's a diagnostic pointer, not a full root-cause analysis, the actual cause (routing delay, poor MQL definition, weak SDR follow-up, pricing friction) needs to be investigated separately.
This model assumes stage rates are independent of volume. In practice, pushing more raw leads into a weak filter (like MQL scoring) can change the rate itself, so re-check rates periodically rather than treating them as fixed constants.
FAQ
Because overall lead-to-win is a multiplied chain, improving your strongest stage by 10 points does far less than improving your weakest stage by the same 10 points. A stage already converting at 70% has little room to improve; one converting at 15% usually has the most fixable friction and the most leverage.
Most commonly a mismatch between marketing's MQL definition and what sales actually considers qualified, plus routing delay (leads going stale before a rep reaches them) and unclear follow-up ownership. It's rarely a top-of-funnel volume problem.
Use a rolling 3-6 month average where possible. Single-month rates are noisy, especially at the opportunity→win stage where deal cycles can span months and distort a single period's numbers.
It guarantees more deals surviving that stage, which flows through to more wins if downstream stages hold steady. It doesn't guarantee deal value or win-rate at later stages stays the same as a higher volume of deals moves through them, watch for quality dilution if the fix just lowers the qualification bar.