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.

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.

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.

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

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 takes 48 hours and names the records line by line.

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