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Sales Target Calculator: Work Back From Revenue to Daily Activity

A revenue target on its own tells you nothing about what to do on Monday morning. This calculator works the number backwards — from the money, to the deals, to the opportunities, to the conversations you need to have each working day. Everything happens in your browser; nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Enter a revenue target and an average deal value to see a result.

How this works

There are four steps, and each one is a single division.

First, deals needed: your revenue target divided by your average deal value. Second, opportunities needed: the number of deals divided by your win rate. If you close a quarter of what you work, you need four times as many opportunities as deals. Third, conversations needed: opportunities divided by the share of first conversations that turn into a real opportunity. Fourth, daily activity: conversations divided by the number of working days in the period.

Deals, opportunities and conversations are all rounded up to whole numbers, because half an opportunity does not exist and rounding down leaves you short of target. The per-day figures are shown to one decimal place, because they are averages across the period rather than counts — but the calculator also gives you the rounded-up daily number to plan against, since you cannot make 4.5 calls on a Tuesday.

Use the win rate from your own CRM rather than a number you would like to be true. If you are not sure how your stages are defined, this breakdown of pipeline stages is a reasonable place to start.

A worked example

Say your target is £600,000 for the year, your average deal is £12,000, you win 25% of the opportunities you work, and you have 220 working days after holidays and leave. Two in ten of your first conversations turn into a real opportunity.

Deals: £600,000 ÷ £12,000 = 50 deals.

Opportunities: 50 ÷ 0.25 = 200 opportunities.

Conversations: 200 ÷ 0.20 = 1,000 conversations.

Daily activity: 1,000 ÷ 220 = 4.5 conversations per working day — call it 5 a day to be safe. Put another way, you need to create a new opportunity roughly every other day, all year, to hit £600,000.

That last sentence is usually the useful one. A target that sounds ambitious in a spreadsheet often sounds either obviously achievable or obviously impossible once it becomes "five real conversations a day, every day".

What this doesn't account for

This is a steady-state model and sales is not steady state. It assumes your average deal value holds, that your win rate is stable, and that a conversation you have in January converts within the same period — which it will not if your sales cycle is four months long and your period is a quarter. For a quarterly target, the activity you need to do this quarter is really feeding the next one.

It also treats every deal as the same size. If one £200,000 deal is doing most of the work in your plan, the averages are lying to you, and the daily activity number will look far more comfortable than reality. Nor does it allow for renewals, expansion revenue or inbound enquiries, all of which reduce the outbound activity you need — if a meaningful share of your target comes from existing customers, take that off the top before you start.

Finally, activity is not the same as productive activity. Five bad conversations a day will not convert at the rate you typed in. Once you have the number, the next question is whether the process behind it is actually working.

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