What does a pound of pipeline actually cost you?

Because the cost of producing an activity collapsed, and a metric only carries information when it is expensive to fake.

Volume used to be a reasonable proxy for effort. Writing a hundred decent emails took real time, so a rep producing them was demonstrably working. That inference has broken. A hundred mediocre, plausible, personalised-looking emails can now be generated in the time it used to take to write two, which means a high activity number no longer distinguishes a productive rep from an unproductive one.

The number did not become wrong so much as uninformative, which is worse, because teams carry on reporting it and believing it means something.

Measure the activities required, as a proxy for time spent, for every pound of pipeline created.

It is one ratio and it does something no activity count does. It refuses to reward volume on its own. A rep sending four hundred emails a week to produce the same pipeline as a rep sending eighty is not working harder in any sense the business benefits from. They are spending more of a finite resource for the same return, and the ratio makes that visible immediately.

It also travels. Activity counts mean nothing outside the sales development function, because nobody else knows whether nine hundred touches is good. A cost per pound of pipeline is legible to anybody who has ever run a budget.

Not the reps. It is whoever holds the budget and the profit and loss.

This is the part most sales development leaders miss when they introduce the measure. They expect it to land as a coaching tool, a way of showing a rep where their time goes. It does do that. But the significant reaction almost always comes from the finance or executive side of the table, because the ratio puts into financial terms exactly how difficult it has become to compete for attention in this market.

Everyone in a revenue leadership role has a general sense that outbound got harder. Very few of them have seen it expressed as a unit cost. The moment it is, the conversation changes from "why is the team not doing more" to "what is it costing us to generate a pound of pipeline, and is that sustainable".

That is a far better conversation, and it is one sales development leaders rarely get invited into.

It changes how you run the team, in roughly this order.

You stop setting activity targets as a primary goal, because you now have a measure that captures what the activity target was a crude proxy for. Activity minimums can still exist as a floor for new starters. They stop being the scoreboard.

You start treating rep time as the scarce input it is, which changes how you think about research depth, list quality and channel mix. Anything that reduces the touches needed per pound of pipeline is now visibly valuable.

And you start reporting upwards in a unit your executive team already understands, which is the foundation of every other conversation you need to have with them.

Related: Why your SDRs and AEs disagree about what counts as a qualified meeting