What a modest leak rate costs a $10M company

"Leakage" is a polite word. It sounds like a rounding error, the kind of thing a finance team notes and moves past. So it's worth running the arithmetic on a concrete company, because the polite word hides a six-figure line item at surprisingly ordinary assumptions.

The figures below are medians from 214 audits applied to a hypothetical company. They are illustrative; your portal will say something different, which is the point. (For the definitions behind the terms, see what is revenue leakage.)

The setup

Take a $10M sales-led B2B company: ten reps carrying quota, $20K average deal, a CRM with three years of history. Across audited portals, the median team sees about 1.2 records per rep go quiet each month: leads, deals, or quotes that stop getting worked without being concluded. For ten reps, that's roughly 144 records a year sliding into silence.

Pause on that rate for a second, because it sounds implausibly low and implausibly high at the same time. Low, because a rep touching hundreds of records a quarter surely drops more than one a month. High, because no rep thinks of themselves as abandoning anything. Both reactions are correct: the rate counts only records with a plausible live buyer still attached, which excludes most of what actually goes untouched. It's the qualified silence, not the total silence.

The honest discount

Most of those records don't turn into money, and an honest count says so up front. The audit convention: count only records with a plausible live buyer, then discount by the close rate dormant records actually achieve once they're worked again, a median of 4.4%. So 144 records at 4.4% is about six deals. At $20K each, call it $127,000 a year.

That's the floor for one year's leakage, at one modest going-quiet rate, counted with deliberately unflattering assumptions. It ignores the backlog: the three years of history where the same rate ran quietly before anyone measured it. Portals with real history usually hold several years of accumulated leak, which is why audit findings tend to land well above the single-year floor. The counting rules that keep that figure defensible, exclusions first, discounts second, are documented in why we count conservatively.

What makes the number move

Deal size moves it linearly; at a $50K average deal, the same six recovered deals are worth over $300K. Rep count moves it the same way. But the going-quiet rate is the lever that varies most between companies, and it's the one nobody knows without looking: disciplined teams run well under the median, and teams mid-turnover or mid-reorg run multiples of it.

Two situations reliably spike the rate:

• Rep turnover. Every departure strands a book, and stranded books go quiet wholesale rather than one record at a time. A team that lost two reps last year didn't leak 1.2 records per rep per month; it leaked entire territories. (The containment procedure is the rep offboarding checklist.)
• Growth spurts. A team that doubled its lead flow without doubling its follow-up capacity converted the surplus directly into leak. The demand spend looked like growth; the unworked share of it was a purchase of future dormant records.

The difference between guessing your rate and knowing it is the difference between a shrug and a budget line.

Scale it to your own company

The formula is three multiplications: reps × going-quiet rate × 12 months × re-engagement close rate × average deal. With the medians filled in, per rep per year: 1.2 × 12 × 4.4% × your deal size. At $20K that's about $12,700 per rep per year of floor-level annual leak, before backlog. A 25-rep team at $30K deals carries a floor near $475K. Run your own numbers with your own deal size; the multiplication takes less time than the meeting where somebody doubts it.

Or skip the estimate. The 15-minute self-check replaces the modeled rate with your portal's actual counts, and the full audit replaces the whole exercise with named records: every dormant lead, deal, and quote listed with its owner, its last touch, and its discounted value, checkable line by line in your own CRM.

The question this leaves

Six recovered deals a year won't transform a $10M company. But $127K recovered at the cost of working records you already own compares favorably with what the same dollar of new pipeline costs to buy. Unlike the hypothetical above, your version of the number is checkable. It's sitting in your portal now, in filters that take an afternoon to run, or in an audit that names the records line by line.

The arithmetic is only illustrative. The pile it describes isn't.