Define each sales stage, use compatible stage rates, and work backward one whole stage at a time from the jobs you want.
A dashboard total called “leads” does not tell you how many estimates the office must arrange or how many jobs a crew can deliver. A form submission, a genuine inquiry, a completed estimate and a won job are separate events. Planning is clearer when the counts stay separate.
The Contractor Estimate-to-Job Planner → models that path with your own rates or compatible historical counts. It does not inspect your CRM, qualify inquiries or predict advertising performance.
Agree on what the stages mean
Write down “genuine inquiry,” “completed estimate” and “won job” before calculating rates. Decide how duplicate calls, existing customers, unserviceable locations and estimates still awaiting a decision appear in your records. Keep the definitions useful to your business rather than changing them to make a ratio look better.
Use a compatible group and allow enough time for its estimates to close. Dividing jobs won this month by estimates completed this month can mix older wins with newer estimates. The planner cannot repair that cohort mismatch from three totals. If the groups do not match, label the rates as assumptions and reconcile records before treating them as measured.
A fictional ten-job plan
Suppose an owner selects a ten-job goal. The explicitly chosen inquiry-to-completed-estimate rate is 50%, and the completed-estimate-to-job rate is 25%.
- Required completed estimates: ceil(10 ÷ 0.25) = 40 estimates.
- Required genuine inquiries: ceil(40 ÷ 0.50) = 80 inquiries.
- The product of the two stage rates is 12.5%. That product describes the supplied rate assumptions, not the likelihood of any particular person buying.
The calculation rounds estimates upward before deriving whole inquiries. For a different fictional seven-job goal with a 30% estimate win rate and a 60% inquiry-to-estimate rate, it first needs ceil(7 ÷ 0.30) = 24 estimates, then ceil(24 ÷ 0.60) = 40 inquiries. Directly multiplying and rounding only at the end can describe a different workload.
Plan the office work as well as the crew work
Forty estimates are not merely a conversion statistic. Someone must handle their preparation and follow-up. Give the office an owner-defined plan for contact, scheduling, estimate completion and handoff. The Lead Follow-Up Planner → can document those responsibilities without sending messages or imposing an invented response deadline.
Then compare the goal with crew capacity. Ten won jobs at three crew-days each require 30 crew-days. If only 24 are available in the period, the modeled delivery capacity is eight whole jobs. The pipeline arithmetic can still show the ten-job goal, but it cannot make that goal fit.
Read a gap as a question, not a diagnosis
If inquiries rise while completed estimates do not, check the definitions, service fit, contact completion and timing before blaming one channel. If estimates rise without wins, review scope, pricing, decision timing and record completeness. The rates alone cannot prove which factor caused the difference.
Likewise, an inquiry that does not become a job is not automatically waste. A person may be outside scope or still deciding. Do not turn this planning worksheet into an automatic negative-keyword or staff-performance judgment.
Put the next review on one page
Record the goal, period, stage definitions, source of each rate and owner for resolving missing evidence. Run the planner, then examine job contribution and crew capacity before raising spend →. For a separately reviewed advertising plan, ThinkDMG’s PPC services → are the relevant service connection. More spending is not the default answer to an unexplained stage gap.
