Step 1: Start with What’s Already Secured

This begins with three basic inputs:

1. Revenue Goal (Rg) - your total target or budget for the year.

2. Secured Revenue (Rs) - the amount of closed-won work you have already booked.

3. Current Pipeline (Pc) - the total value of all open opportunities currently in play.

The first question is: How much more revenue do I need to close to achieve my goal?

Revenue Needed = Rg - Rs

Step 2: Find the Remaining Revenue Gap

To identify the remaining revenue gap to fill, you will need to estimate what your existing pipeline may deliver. Remember, not every opportunity converts, so you will need to apply a weighting to your deals. There are a couple of ways to estimate this:

• Apply your average win-rate (Wr) to the open pipeline: Estimated Revenue = Pc * Wr

• If you have a mature client services organization, the account managers should be updating each deal with a probability based on their understanding of the client priority and stage in the funnel. These probabilities create your weighted pipeline (Pw).

Once you have an understanding of how much revenue your current pipeline may produce, you can subtract that amount from the Revenue Needed figure in Step 1 to determine what your Revenue Gap is. The Revenue Gap is the shortfall you must make up with new opportunities that you currently have no visibility into.

Step 3: Convert the Revenue Gap into a Pipeline Target

This exercise is probably the most important step in the process. By understanding win-rates, time-to-close deals, and typical deal sizes and durations, you can reverse engineer a target number of new pipeline additions - this target can be assigned to your sales, client services, and marketing organizations. Having a clearly defined pipeline target allows easy tracking and creates the space to discuss strategies to drive demand.

To determine the Pipeline Target (Pt), “gross-up” the Revenue Gap: Pt = Revenue Gap / Wr, then adjust for timing. Here is where many services firms go wrong - not every deal you add to the pipeline can both close and deliver revenue within the current fiscal year. To adjust for this, determine your Average Time to Close (Tc) and Average Project Duration (Pd). Use these factors alongside the remaining months in the year to define your time-window factor that represents the new opportunities that can realistically turn into revenue this fiscal year.

This is a critical figure to understand as you determine strategies for your teams. Here’s why: If your average deal takes three months to close and runs for six months, and we are just entered August, that 6-month deal will only contribute revenue for 2 months this fiscal year. The remaining 4 months of revenue will increase your secured revenue amount for next year. The earlier you do this type of analysis, the more levers you have to adjust your strategies.

Step 4: Convert this Data into Action

You now know the required new pipeline and the gap you need to close to achieve it. To convert this data into action, work backwards to define how marketing, partnerships, sales, and other demand generation activities must perform. This reframes marketing from a cost center to a performance engine directly tied to revenue. It’s not just about “getting more leads”, it’s about knowing how much qualified pipeline you must create to mathematically achieve your goal. When it’s broken down into these clear pieces, it’s much easier to assign to members of your team and track their progress against the goals, and the conversation naturally shifts to how to generate that pipeline:

• Targeted Account-Based Campaigns to focus effort on high-potential clients

• Thought-Leadership and Educational Content to position your expertise early in the buyer journey

• Partner and Channel Strategies to expand reach efficiently

• Operational Intelligence Dashboards (like Form + Function’s AI-Enhanced Dashboards) to track progress and conversion in real time

By linking your marketing and demand-generation strategies directly to the pipeline target, every action becomes measurable—and every dollar invested has a clear path to revenue impact.

Final Thought

As quarters progress, update the inputs - win rate, deal size, close time, and project duration - to keep forecasts realistic. Over time, you’ll develop a dynamic model that links operational metrics to revenue predictability. Beyond the metrics, visibility into this data will allow you to learn even more about your clients and the effectiveness of your go-to-market strategies, your services, and your teams.