How many meetings your teamcan actually book.
Pipeline targets get set in spreadsheets and missed in reality, because nobody did the throughput math first. Enter your reps, daily activity, and the two rates that govern everything, and this tells you the meetings your outbound team can realistically book this month, where the funnel leaks, and exactly what it costs to hit a bigger number.
Your numbers
Reps actively running outbound this month.
Emails + calls a rep sends or dials in a day. 60-100 is a typical sustainable band.
Selling days after holidays, training, and admin. ~21 is a full month.
Share of touches that actually reach a live person (a connect or a real reply).
Share of contacts that agree to book a meeting.
100% for a fully ramped team. Drop it for new hires or part-time capacity.
The verdict
Meetings / month
48
Meetings per SDR
16
Contacts made
403
Touches per meeting
104
Raw activity it takes to book one.
Where the funnel narrows
Per-rep load vs. a healthy band
Scenario · add reps
Meetings at 4 reps
65
Extra meetings/mo
16
Adding 1 rep at your current 8% contact and 12% meeting rates takes you from 48 to 65 meetings a month — about 16 more. If the rates themselves are weak, fixing the list and message lifts every existing rep at once and usually beats hiring on cost per meeting.
Sensitivity · the contact-rate lever
Small rate moves, big meeting swings
| Contact rate | Contacts | Meetings |
|---|---|---|
| 2% | 101 | 12 |
| 4% | 202 | 24 |
| 6% | 302 | 36 |
| 8% | 403 | 48 |
| 10% | 504 | 60 |
| 12% | 605 | 73 |
| 15% | 756 | 91 |
| 20% | 1,008 | 121 |
Everything but the contact rate is held at your numbers. Because the chain multiplies, doubling contact rate doubles meetings outright — which is why the list and channel that drive contact rate usually deserve attention before the script.
Your move
You've got the capacity number. I help you actually hit it.
48 meetings/month from 3 SDRs (16.1/rep) at 8% contact × 12% meeting rate.
A model tells you what's possible; execution decides what lands. Bring me your real numbers and I'll tell you whether your gap is the list, the message, the channel mix, or the headcount, and what I'd change first to book more meetings without burning the team out. Free, and the plan is yours either way.
Plain English
Capacity is a multiplication problem, not a hope
SDR capacity is the number of meetings your outbound team can book in a month, given how many reps you have, how much they do each day, and the two conversion rates that turn raw activity into booked calls. Every meeting on the calendar started as a touch that survived two filters: it reached a human, and that human said yes.
The reason capacity gets missed is that the chain compounds. A team sending what looks like a wall of activity can still under-deliver because an 8% contact rate and a 12% meeting rate mean roughly one meeting for every hundred touches. Multiply small numbers and you get small numbers, fast. The math is unforgiving, which is exactly why it's worth doing before you commit to a quota.
This calculator runs the full chain for you: touches into contacts, contacts into meetings, then meetings per rep so you can sanity-check the load. It also shows the touches-per-meeting cost of your current rates, so you know whether to grow the team, lift activity, or fix the rate that's actually choking the funnel.
The formula
Meetings = SDRs × Touches/day × Working days × Ramp% × Contact% × Meeting%
3 reps × 80 touches × 21 days = 5,040 touches/month. At a 100% ramp that's 5,040 effective touches. An 8% contact rate makes ~403 contacts; a 12% meeting rate turns those into ~48 booked meetings, or ~16 per rep. It takes roughly 104 touches to produce one meeting at those rates.
Rule-of-thumb rates by motion
Contact and meeting rates swing hard with channel, list quality, and ICP fit, so treat these as planning anchors to pressure-test your own numbers against, not promises. Calls connect with more people but cost more time per touch; cold email reaches fewer but scales. Dial in your real rates above and trust those.
| Outbound motion | Contact rate | Meeting rate | Touches / meeting |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phone-led | 10-15% | 10-20% | ~50-100 |
| Blended (call + email) | 6-10% | 10-15% | ~80-160 |
| Cold email only | 3-8% | 8-12% | ~150-400 |
| Multi-channel + LinkedIn | 8-14% | 12-18% | ~50-120 |
Rule-of-thumb planning anchors — not a published dataset. Rates swing hard with channel, list quality, and ICP fit; dial in your real numbers above and trust those.
The number came back low. Which lever?
Contact rate under ~5%.
You're spraying into the void. The list or the channel is wrong before the message is. Tighten the ICP, verify the data, and weight toward calls or multi-channel sequences that actually reach people.
Good contact rate, weak meeting rate.
You're reaching people but not earning the yes. That's a messaging and offer problem. Rewrite the opener around their problem, not your product, and make the ask a low-friction, specific time.
Both rates fine, total still short.
This is a volume or headcount ceiling. You've maxed efficiency; now you need more at-bats. Add reps, lift sustainable daily touches, or extend selling days lost to admin.
Meetings per rep look implausibly high.
Your input rates are optimistic, or the touches aren't real touches. Re-check against last month's actuals. A capacity model is only as honest as the two percentages you feed it.
New hires dragging the average.
Don't blend ramped and ramping reps into one rate. Model the ramp separately (drop the ramp slider), expect 60-70% in months 1-2, and plan pipeline around the realistic curve.
Eight ways to book more meetings from the same team
01Fix the list before the script
A clean, tightly-targeted list lifts contact rate more than any opener. Garbage data caps every downstream number; no message saves a wrong-fit prospect.
02Add a channel, not just volume
Single-channel sequences plateau. Layering call + email + LinkedIn on the same prospect raises the odds you reach them without raising raw touch count.
03Protect selling days
Meetings, training, and CRM admin quietly eat working days. Every day you reclaim is a few percent more meetings with zero new spend.
04Make the ask specific
'Got 15 minutes Thursday at 2?' converts better than 'open to a chat?'. A concrete, low-friction ask lifts meeting rate on the contacts you already reach.
05Triple-dial before you give up
Most connects happen after several attempts. Cadence discipline on the same list raises contact rate without expanding the list.
06Tighten the opener to their problem
Lead with the prospect's pain, not your product. Relevance in the first line is the single biggest mover of reply and meeting rates.
07Ramp new reps deliberately
Structured onboarding shortens time-to-quota. Model ramping reps at reduced capacity so your forecast doesn't promise meetings they can't yet book.
08Kill no-shows at the source
Booked isn't held. Confirmations and reminders protect the meetings you worked to book, so capacity turns into actual pipeline.
The vocabulary
- Touch
- A single outbound attempt: one email sent or one call dialed. The raw unit of SDR activity.
- Contact rate
- Share of touches that reach a live person (a connect or a genuine reply). The first filter on raw activity.
- Meeting rate
- Share of contacts who agree to book a meeting. The second filter; together with contact rate it sets your touches-per-meeting.
- Ramp factor
- A new rep's productivity as a percentage of a fully-ramped one. Used to plan realistic capacity during onboarding.
- Touches per meeting
- Total touches divided by meetings booked: how much raw activity it costs to produce one meeting at your current rates.
- Meetings per SDR
- Total meetings divided by reps: the per-head load you're modeling, useful for sanity-checking quotas.
SDR capacity questions, straight answers
At typical rates, roughly 10 to 20 a month. A rep doing 80 touches a day across ~21 days makes ~1,680 touches; at an 8% contact rate and 12% meeting rate that's about 16 meetings. Call-heavy teams with higher contact rates can push past 20; email-only motions with low contact rates often land below 10. Your real contact and meeting rates decide it, so model with last month's actuals.
Keep going
A calculator tells you what. A call tells you what to do about it.
Send me the account behind these numbers. I'll tell you straight where the money's leaking and what I'd fix first — free, and you keep it whether you hire me or not.