A board report has a figure for almost everything. Bookings, pipeline coverage, cost per lead, customer retention — every pound earned or spent has a number, an owner and a trend line. During the years I spent preparing and reviewing those reports across sales, product and marketing, I never once saw a line labelled the leak.
And yet almost everyone seems to know its size. Around 10% of revenue is supposedly lost because marketing, sales and customer success do not work well together.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: nobody has ever actually seen that 10%. Not the analysts who first published the estimate. Not the consultants who repeat it. Not your CFO. Not me. Once you understand why, you'll look at every misalignment statistic differently including the one I use.
The parade of statistics
Spend twenty minutes searching online and you'll find plenty of impressive numbers.
Companies lose 10% of revenue because of misalignment. Or perhaps it's 10–15%. Some sources claim 38%, usually crediting Forrester. Others talk about a trillion dollars disappearing every year. You'll also see the familiar claim that 79% of marketing leads never become customers.
Now try tracing any of those figures back to the original research. Who carried out the study? When was it published? How many companies took part? What method was used? In many cases, the trail ends surprisingly quickly.
The widely quoted 38% figure is often linked to Forrester, but despite looking carefully, I've never found the original research behind it. The trillion-dollar estimate appears in countless vendor presentations without a clear source. It has become one of those numbers that everyone repeats because everyone else already has.
The statistic about 79% of leads comes from research that's now old enough to belong to a very different era of B2B selling. It reflects a world of web forms and cold handovers that looks very little like today's buying process.
This is how statistics become detached from reality. A study begins with careful research and clear limits. A conference presentation keeps the headline figure but drops the caveats. A software vendor quotes the presentation. A LinkedIn post quotes the vendor. Each step keeps the percentage but loses the explanation behind it. Eventually the number takes on a life of its own. People quote it because it sounds convincing, even though very few know where it came from.
To be fair, one estimate stands up better than most. IDC has long suggested that poor alignment between commercial teams costs organisations around 10% of annual revenue. It's an estimate rather than a recent study, and it's roughly a decade old, but it's also the only benchmark I use.
Even so, it shares an important limitation with all the others. And that limitation is far more interesting than poor referencing.
A leak is something that never happened
Here's the real problem. A revenue leak is a what if. It's the deal that would have been won if the handover between teams had gone smoothly. It's the customer who would have expanded their contract if onboarding had matched what sales promised. It's the lead that would have converted if it hadn't been left sitting between two departments with different ideas of what 'qualified' means.
Your systems can't record any of those things. Systems record events. They record meetings, stage changes, invoices and renewals. They can't record something that never happened.
A lead that quietly goes cold during a handover simply appears as 'no activity'. That looks exactly the same as a lead that was never worth pursuing in the first place.
A customer who leaves because expectations were set badly during the sales process usually ends up with a churn reason chosen from a drop-down menu months after the real problem began.
A company that never enters your pipeline because marketing and sales disagree about what an ideal customer looks like leaves no trace at all.
The better your dashboards become, the better they are at showing everything except what leaked away.
I didn't learn this from a dashboard. I learnt it during a quarterly business review. Every department was represented. Every figure had been checked. Marketing had delivered several campaigns and reported healthy lead numbers. Sales had closed one average-sized deal but pointed confidently to several large opportunities that were 'very likely' to close during the quarter. Customer success reported strong renewal rates, although many renewals had required a small discount. Nothing anyone presented was inaccurate. But I remember sitting there thinking, this engine isn't moving. The campaigns looked remarkably similar to the previous quarter's. Only the dates had changed. Those large deals had also been 'very likely to close this quarter' three months earlier. The 'small' renewal discounts had become so common they were beginning to look less like exceptions and more like standard practice. Every team reported genuine activity. What nobody could show were the things happening between those activities. The leads that never became real opportunities. The opportunities that never became signed contracts. The discounts that nobody questioned because a renewal still counted as a success. The leak wasn't hidden inside anyone's numbers. It existed in the gaps between them. The reports described activity. They didn't describe progress. And there wasn't a single line in the board pack capable of showing the difference.
So where does a figure like 10% come from if no finance system can ever produce it? By comparing companies with one another.Researchers measure organisations that are highly aligned against those that are not and compare the difference in performance. That's perfectly legitimate research. But it produces an average difference across many organisations. It does not measure your organisation.
Using the 10% figure as though it describes your business is rather like using the average household electricity bill as your own. It tells you that the category exists. It gives you a rough idea of its size. It tells you nothing about your own meter, because you haven't measured it.
Three questions to ask whenever someone quotes a leak number
That leads to a simple test. Whenever someone — whether it's a consultant, software vendor, article or even me — tells you how much revenue your business is losing because of misalignment, ask three questions.
Where is the original study?
Not the blog that quoted it. Not the presentation that borrowed it. The original study. If nobody can point you towards it, you've learned something important about every other number they're using.
What did it actually measure?
An average difference between aligned and misaligned organisations is a useful benchmark. It tells you whether the problem is likely to be worth investigating. It does not tell you what's happening inside your business.
Can you measure mine — and measure it again afterwards?
This is the question that separates a genuine diagnostic from a sales pitch. A credible answer explains what evidence will be examined. CRM records. Financial results. Customer interviews. Operational data. Not simply a self-assessment questionnaire. It also uses a measurement that stays consistent over time and commits to repeating that same measurement after changes have been made. Only then can you demonstrate improvement rather than simply claim it.
There's another reason this matters. A proper measurement accepts the possibility that your leak may turn out to be smaller than the industry benchmark. If the assessment can only ever confirm the consultant's sales message, it isn't really an assessment at all. That's the standard I try to apply in my own work. The industry benchmark is a starting point. Your own evidence is what tells you where the real problem lies.
The line that isn't there
The leak will never appear in your board report. Not because it isn't real. The research, despite all the recycled statistics, points towards a genuine problem. The reason is much simpler. Board reports are built from the information each department records. The leak exists between departments, where nothing is recorded and no one owns the outcome. That absence isn't a reason to ignore it. It's exactly why you have to measure it deliberately.
So keep the 10%.
Use it for what it really is: a benchmark that says, this problem is probably worth an afternoon of your attention.
Then find your own number. Measure it using your own evidence. Measure it on a scale you can use again. Your board report will still contain figures for almost everything. The difference is that the line which was missing for all those years will finally have an answer, even if it never appears as a row in the report.
If the number everyone quotes can't be traced to anything, the answer isn't a better citation. It's a figure measured in your own business.
Free, 30 minutes. No preparation needed.