The math of outbound is a chain of six ratios: dials to connects, connects to conversations, conversations to meetings, meetings booked to held, held to opportunities, opportunities to closed-won. Multiply them forward and you can forecast revenue from a rep's day. Run them backwards and you get the activity and headcount a revenue goal requires. Here is the model with benchmark values from our analysis of 1,000,000 B2B cold calls in France, a worked example for a European team, and the cost-of-sales levers it exposes.

The six ratios and where to get them

Every number below should eventually come from your own data. Until you have three months of it, these are the defaults we use.

• Dials to connects: 11.3% average in France, 15.8% at 4pm, 9.8% at 8am.
• Connects to conversations: in our experience about 60% of connects get past the opener with the right person.
• Conversations to meetings booked: 2-3% with a pitch-first opener, 7-10% with a trigger-based opener.
• Booked to held: 75% without a confirmation step, above 80% with one, in our experience.
• Held to qualified opportunity: around 50% when the qualification bar is agreed with the AE.
• Opportunity to closed-won: yours. We use 25% as a placeholder below; replace it with your last four quarters.

Forward: from one SDR's day to annual revenue

Take one SDR with a parallel dialer, 20 conversations a day, a trigger-based opener at 8.5%, and an average contract value of €15,000. Twenty working days a month.

• 400 conversations a month, 34 meetings booked.
• At 75% held: 25 held meetings. At 50%: 13 qualified opportunities.
• At a 25% win rate: 3 deals a month, €47,000 of new ARR a month, about €560,000 a year from one SDR.

Now change two inputs and nothing else. A single-line dialer gives 8 conversations a day, and a pitch-first opener books 2.5%.

• 160 conversations a month, 4 meetings booked, 3 held, 1.5 opportunities.
• At 25%: 0.4 deals a month, about €70,000 a year.

Same rep, same product, same list. An 8x difference in revenue from two decisions: how many conversations the tool produces and how the rep opens. That is why we say connect rate is an input and the opener is the lever.

Backward: from a revenue goal to a headcount plan

A European SaaS wants €2M of new ARR from outbound next year at €15,000 ACV. Work the chain in reverse.

• 133 deals. At 25% win rate: 533 qualified opportunities.
• At 50% held-to-opportunity: 1,067 held meetings. At 75% held: 1,422 booked.
• At 8.5% per conversation: about 16,700 conversations in the year.
• At 20 conversations a day and 220 working days: 4,400 conversations per SDR per year. You need 4 SDRs.
• At 8 conversations a day: 1,760 per SDR. You need 10.

With a fully loaded SDR cost in France of, say, €65,000 (use your own), that is €260,000 of headcount against €650,000 for the same pipeline. The dialer and the opener are not line items; they are the difference between the two plans.

Cost per meeting and cost of sales

Once the chain exists, cost metrics fall out of it. Cost per held meeting is the monthly fully loaded cost of the SDR plus tools, divided by held meetings. In the first scenario above: roughly €5,400 of monthly cost for 25 held meetings, about €220 a meeting. In the second: the same cost for 3 held meetings, about €1,800 a meeting.

Two European specifics change the numbers. French connect rates are modest at 11.3% on average, so every extra point of connect rate matters; plan dials on local data. And August is a lost month for most B2B personas; a 12-month model that spreads activity evenly will miss by a month.

Where the model breaks

Ratios are averages, and averages hide the things that move them. Four to watch.

• Lists burn. Connect rate falls as a list is worked. In our experience, most connects happen within the first three attempts; after that you are paying for voicemails.
• Signals change the meeting rate. Calling a contact with a CRM signal (a website visit, a job change, a closed-lost note) is a different funnel. 50% of our own pipeline comes from signals already in the CRM. Model signal-sourced and cold-sourced conversations separately.
• Ramp. A new SDR does not produce 20 conversations in month one. Put a ramp curve in the headcount plan.
• Small samples. One rep's 8.5% over two weeks is 30 meetings on 350 conversations. Do not reforecast on a week.

How Sonik approaches the math of outbound

Sonik's product is built on the first three ratios. Parallel dialing moves conversations per day, about 5x in practice, which is the input every other ratio multiplies. CRM signals move the meeting rate per conversation, which is why the dialer pulls website visitors, job changes, closed-lost and dormant leads into the daily list. Our mission is 2x more meetings via 5x more conversations with the right contacts; the model above is how we check it.

The dashboard reports each ratio by rep and by slot, so the forecast is rebuilt from live numbers rather than from the assumptions you made in January. When a ratio drifts, you see which one, and the headcount conversation becomes a ratio conversation.

Conclusion

Outbound is arithmetic once you accept that the ratios are yours to measure and two of them are yours to move. Build the chain, fill it with three months of your own data, and run it both ways before the next planning cycle. This week, compute your current cost per held meeting. If it is above €1,000, the fix is conversations and openers, not more reps.