- Formula
key events / qualified leads- Unit
- Percentage
- Direction
- Higher is better
- Across periods
- Recomputed from totals, never averaged
- In KO
crKe
CR KE is the share of qualified leads that reach the key event — the demo, the meeting, the quote, the trial access: the step after which a deal becomes likely.
It is the first conversion in the funnel that marketing does not own. The lead has already been judged fit; what happens next depends on how fast someone got in touch and what was agreed.
Formula
CR KE = key events / qualified leadsOut of 200 qualified leads, 60 reached a demo:
60 / 200 = 30%The neighbouring conversion to qualified answers a different question — about traffic. Together they split the responsibility:
| Formula | Whose step | |
|---|---|---|
| CR QL | qualified / leads | marketing: who was brought in |
| CR KE | key events / qualified | sales: how they worked the lead |
| CR Sale | sales / key events | sales: how they closed |
Overall lead-to-sale conversion is the product of all three. A drop in it says nothing on its own: until you can see which multiplier fell, there is nothing to fix.
What moves it
Speed of first response. At this step it matters more than everything else combined: the difference between replying in ten minutes and replying the next day shows up in CR KE immediately and is not compensated anywhere further down.
The definition of the event itself. A key event is a setting. Move it one step earlier — “demo booked” instead of “demo held” — and conversion rises without anything changing in substance. Comparing CR KE across two companies is meaningless when their key events differ; comparing your own over time works only while the definition holds still.
Team load. Step conversion falls as volume grows — the most common way to ruin a good month for leads. A sharp traffic increase with an unchanged team is almost always visible here rather than in sales volume, and it is visible earlier.
How KO computes it
In KO crKe is a derived metric with the formula key events / qualified leads. Both inputs
are counts of leads by the project’s funnel stages, so the conversion measures the move
between stages rather than between different entities, and a lead that skipped a stage is
not lost.
The metric is derived: at every level of the report — campaign, channel, breakdown, period —
it is recomputed from summed inputs and never averaged up from the level below. A quarter
equals Σkey events / Σqualified, not the mean of three months.
Where there are no qualified leads in the period, the result is empty (—), not zero.
It is worth watching how many leads are stuck between stages alongside it: conversion over a short period is understated by construction when the sales cycle is longer than that period. That is exactly why the funnel section shows lead age at a stage next to the conversion.
Related terms
- Key event — what counts as this step.
- Qualified lead — the denominator of this conversion.
- Conversion to sale — the next multiplier in the funnel.