Revenue Leak

Money you should have made but didn't, because of broken handoffs, bad data, or process gaps nobody owns. It's not churn. It's revenue that never had a chance.

The Formula
Revenue Leak = Expected Revenue Actual Realized Revenue
Expected RevenueRevenue based on forecasts, entitlements, or contracts
Actual RealizedRevenue actually booked or collected
Real Example

Your CRM shows 500 MQLs last quarter. Only 200 were followed up within 48 hours. Of the 300 that waited longer, conversion rate dropped by 60%. That's revenue leak. Not a marketing problem or a sales problem, but a handoff problem.

Real Talk

Revenue leak is the silent killer. Not the deal you lost to a competitor. The deal that never got followed up. The upsell nobody pitched. The renewal that slipped because the CSM didn't know the contract was ending.

Most companies leak 5-15% of potential revenue. The worst part? It's invisible. Marketing blames sales. Sales blames product. CS blames everyone. Nobody owns the gaps between teams.

Revenue leak lives in the handoffs. MQL to SQL. SQL to opportunity. Closed-won to onboarding. Every transition is a chance for money to disappear.

Other Definitions
o9 Solutions

Uncollected income stemming from a business's inadvertent oversight, often due to flawed financial and accounting procedures such as pricing inaccuracies, incongruous invoicing systems, or undercharging for services.

Chargebee

The amount of money a business has earned but hasn't actually collected, often due to billing errors, undercharging, or inefficiencies in finance processes.

Spekit (via Clari)

When a business loses expected income due to bad data, inaccurate billing, or weak content governance, causing money that should have been earned to slip away.

Zuora

Unintentional revenue loss, most commonly occurring when a business fails to collect payment due to system errors, contractual oversights, or gaps in billing processes.

Our Take

Most definitions focus on billing and finance: uncollected invoices, pricing errors, undercharging. That's real, but it's only half the story.

The RevOps view is broader. o9 and Chargebee focus on "money earned but not collected." Zuora emphasizes system errors and contractual gaps. Clari/Spekit adds "bad data" to the mix. All valid, but they miss the upstream leaks.

Revenue leak starts long before billing. It's the MQL that sat in a queue for 5 days. The demo that never got scheduled. The renewal conversation that happened two months too late. By the time you're looking at uncollected invoices, you've already lost the bigger money. The real leaks are in the handoffs between teams.

Common Mistakes

Confusing revenue leak with normal churn or competitive losses

Looking for leaks only in sales when they exist across the entire funnel

Trying to fix leaks with more leads instead of better process

Not assigning clear ownership for handoff points

Ready to fix it?

Revenue leaks hide in the handoffs.

We find where your revenue engine is leaking and show you exactly how to fix it. 6 weeks, fixed scope.

Experience across

HSBC
Emerald 24
Navatech
Rakuten