What counts as a qualified opportunity, and how attribution is calculated

Every number we report has a published definition, and this page is the complete list. It also says how credit is assigned when the buying took a year and involved ten people, and where that method stops working.

We are a publisher for aerospace and defense. We sell companies a channel on our titles for their own announcements and their people's pieces, labelled as theirs.

You can read the counting rules below before you sign anything, and hold them up in a review a year from now.

The definitions

These are the definitions used in every report, as they are written in the procedure we run.

Account under signal coverage. In the account universe monitored for you, status active, not on the exclusion list, monitored by at least three sources.

Signal. An event about a specific account, with a retrievable source URL and a verified excerpt, dated within sixty days. All three conditions, every time. A source URL that does not resolve, an excerpt nobody checked against the source, or an event older than sixty days does not count as a signal, and no row exists without one.

Contact. One named person at one account entering an outbound sequence with a verified email. Outbound means we made the first contact.

Reply. Any human response. Auto-replies and out-of-office messages are excluded and counted separately.

Conversation. A reply that continues past the first exchange, meaning at least one message from each side after the initial reply.

Discovery call. A scheduled call that happened, with a person in the buyer set, lasting more than ten minutes.

Qualified opportunity. For this firm's own funnel: a discovery call where the prospect has a stated problem, a role that can specify or buy, and a timeframe. For a customer: whatever the customer signed before work started, which is theirs to define and is reported in their words, not in ours.

Sourced pipeline. Deal value of opportunities where a signal-anchored contact or a published asset preceded the first conversation. Influence-weighted across long cycles, per the attribution method below.

Two rules that keep the list honest

Impressions, reach and engagement rate are excluded by design. We do not report them, and we do not report them on request. A number that can never become revenue tells you nothing about revenue.

A definition cannot be changed quietly. Any change to a published definition carries a dated note stating what changed and when, so a series is still readable a year later.

Who defines a qualified opportunity

You do.

Your definition is agreed in writing before any work starts, and every report uses your words for it. If it requires a named buying-committee role, a stated problem and a timeframe, that is the definition. If it requires a budget line, an airworthiness stakeholder or a programme milestone, that is the definition, and the reporting is built to it.

Any firm that promises a volume of opportunities will eventually meet a month where the honest count is short, and the cheapest way through that month is to loosen what counts. Your signed definition takes that option away. We do not guarantee how many qualified opportunities a period will produce.

A booked meeting is a different product

A booked meeting is a calendar event with someone who accepted an invitation. A qualified opportunity is a conversation that met the definition above. Pricing one against the other gets the answer wrong in both directions.

Vendors sell booked meetings at several levels of qualification. The only level that measures anything close to a qualified opportunity is the top one, where the appointment is verified for budget, authority, need and timing.

The error runs the other way too, and it is the more dangerous one. A firm that prices its work against a meeting rate is under standing pressure to make a qualified opportunity resemble a meeting. That is our reading of how the booked-meeting market arrived at its prices.

How attribution is calculated

Four rules govern every number that reaches a report.

Influence is weighted. Marketing contribution is weighted across the touches that preceded an opportunity.

Each discovery call is counted in one channel, at the earliest recorded touch. The channels are outbound, warm, inbound and referral. A call is never counted in two channels. Where a call could be counted two ways, it goes to the earliest recorded touch and the ambiguity is logged, so the channel numbers stay comparable from one month to the next.

Stale data is marked stale. Any source whose newest record is older than its expected update cycle plus one period is marked stale, and every metric that depends on it shows STALE in the report. Nothing is estimated to fill the gap and nothing is carried forward.

Disagreements are reported as disagreements. Where your CRM and our own logs give different counts, both numbers appear, each with its source, and the difference is raised as a data problem to fix.

An illustration of the first two rules

Synthetic and illustrative.

An account first appears in a signal digest in October. It enters an outbound sequence in November. In January it is recorded visiting a published note. In February someone there replies to a founder-signed email, and in March a discovery call happens.

Origin channel: outbound, because the earliest recorded touch with the account is the November send. The call is counted once, in that channel, and in no other. The October signal and the January visit are recorded as influence on the opportunity. Neither is counted as a second discovery.

Where the method stops

No attribution model resolves a purchase like this into a single cause.

The average B2B buying group is ten people. That figure comes from 6sense's B2B Buyer Experience Report, on nearly 4,000 responses across North America, APAC and EMEA, and it held flat year over year even as buyers evaluated more vendors. We expect aerospace and defense purchases to sit at the high end of that, because engineering, quality, airworthiness, procurement, programme and often a regulatory function each hold a veto.

Ten people, over a cycle long enough that nobody remembers what they read first, cannot be resolved into one channel and one touch. A good attribution method shows what preceded the opportunity, weights it honestly, and marks what it does not know. A firm telling you its attribution isolates the single cause of a purchase like this is selling you a model, and the model is the product.

What one qualified opportunity is worth to you

Whether one qualified opportunity is worth what it costs is decided by your own deal value, margin and win rate. The arithmetic is at /four-times-test, and one of its honest answers is that you should buy nothing.

The benchmark problem

The obvious next question is what good looks like: what a qualified opportunity should cost in this sector, and how long the sales cycle runs. This sector has no benchmark worth the name. Here is the record.

One publisher publishes two aerospace acquisition-cost figures that differ by a factor of about three and a half, and reconciles them nowhere.

First Page Sage's B2B Customer Acquisition KPIs: 2026 Report, last updated 27 February 2025, gives Aerospace and Aviation a customer acquisition cost of $2,120, a cost per lead of $297 and a lead-to-win rate of 4.4 percent. The same publisher's Average Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) By Industry: B2B Edition, last updated 26 January 2026 on data gathered between January 2022 and August 2025, gives Aerospace and Defense a combined customer acquisition cost of $624, and lists Aviation separately at $683.

Both pages were live and re-confirmed on 13 August 2026. Neither page acknowledges the other.

$2,120 is the figure this category repeats, and it is the more flattering one for anybody selling marketing, because it makes the marketing look cheap by comparison.

What both figures actually measure. They are the acquisition costs observed across one vendor's own client base, not a census of the industry. That client base skews toward companies buying search and content services: the February 2025 report discloses a channel mix of 79 percent organic SEO and 13 percent paid search across the 140-plus campaigns behind it. The same publisher notes on its own page that aerospace "is an industry with relatively few major players, making ABM significantly more effective than in other industries", which is the vendor's own statement that broad-funnel economics do not describe this market.

A $624 acquisition cost is coherent for smaller, faster-closing transactions inside aerospace. It is not the cost of landing a systems deal.

There is a third inconsistency inside the same publisher's aerospace data. Their lead-to-opportunity rate for aviation and aerospace is 2.8 percent and their sales-qualified-lead-to-closed-won rate is 18 percent, both last updated 23 December 2025. Chained naively, those give roughly 0.5 percent, an order of magnitude below the 4.4 percent lead-to-win rate on the February 2025 page. The two rates are measured off different denominators and there is no published bridge between them, so they should not be chained. They are reported here separately. The useful reading survives the inconsistency: in aerospace roughly one lead in thirty-six becomes an opportunity, while nearly one sales-qualified lead in five closes. The problem in this market is qualification, not closing.

Nobody publishes a primary source for the aerospace sales cycle. The range the whole category quotes has no primary source behind it. A search for one on 12 August 2026 returned nothing publishable: the sourceable statements are qualitative, and the numeric ranges that circulate come from secondary aggregators with no disclosed methodology. What is sourceable is that First Page Sage attributes aerospace's low lead-to-opportunity rate to long sales cycles, and its close-rate commentary to cycles that delay deal closures.

And nobody publishes a benchmark for what a qualified opportunity costs in aerospace, from any source. Not a good one and not a bad one.

What follows from it. The category quotes a number nobody can reconcile because nobody has produced a better one. We do not price against either figure. Every price we charge is published, on pricing.

Sources for this section, with retrieval dates and a recheck date, are listed at the foot of this page.

Where to start

The person who wrote these definitions carried a pipeline number in front of an executive team in this industry, every quarter: /authors/reuben-mann.

Send us a link to something your company has published → /record/submit

What a channel is, and what it costs → /publish

The conditions under which this is the wrong purchase, including where an in-house hire beats it, are on When not to buy this.

Sources

Every figure on this page, with the URL, the report title and the date. Each carries a recheck date.

Appointment-setting market tiers are drawn from agency sources that sell appointment setting and have an interest in the numbers. They are described here by what each tier verifies.