How Much of a Company's CRM Can You Rebuild From Public Data?

The data Letterdrop sells is non-deterministic. Put plainly, we're guessing.

We look for public evidence that a company is evaluating vendors in your category, and we flag the accounts where that evidence adds up. Nobody hands us a list of open deals. So some of the accounts we flag are in a buying cycle and some aren't.

If you sell guesses, you owe customers a straight answer about how often the guess is right. We wanted a number our customers could plan around, with realistic expectations about what they'll get from a list. So we checked our guesses against company CRMs, which record what really happened.

How we tested it

Seven companies in HR, security, legal, sales, marketing and property data took part.

For each one, we ran Letterdrop as if the participant were the competitor. We flagged the accounts we thought might be evaluating them. Then they looked up every account in their own CRM and told us what was there: an open deal, a renewal, an upsell, a customer, a loss, or nothing.

Between May and October 2026 we flagged 9,277 accounts. The live product ranked each one High, Med or Nurture, the same way it does for customers.

Four rules kept the test honest:

• We matched accounts by company domain. If an account we flagged wasn't in the CRM at all, it counted as a miss.
• An account only counted as a deal you can still win if, on the day we flagged it, it had an open new-business deal, an open renewal, or a new-business loss in the past 90 days.
• Pipeline numbers exclude stale deals.
• Deals that never made it into a CRM aren't counted, so every rate below is a floor.

29% of High accounts were deals you could still win

The ~3% is the number people usually give when they estimate how much of their market is in a buying cycle at any moment. We didn't measure it in this study. It's roughly what a rep is working with when they spray and pray a cold list. High accounts came in at about 10 times that.

Results varied by company. For High accounts, the rate ran from 16% at one company to 42% at another. If you run this on your own market, expect to land somewhere in that range.

Nurture is the weakest tier, and it still found winnable deals at almost four times the random rate.

The flagged accounts held most of the revenue

We also asked the question from the other side: of everything in these CRMs, how much did our list find?

• 38% of open pipeline. $378M of the $1.0B in open deals sat at accounts we had flagged.
• 15% of customers, and 60% of customer revenue. The customers we found skewed to the largest. The ones we missed were mostly smaller accounts.

We ran one more check with our 30 live customers, who track their real competitors. For 13% of their new deals, Letterdrop had flagged the account before the deal existed in their CRM. On average the flag came about three weeks before the deal came inbound or the first meeting was booked.

What a High list contains

Here's what the 461 High accounts turned out to be, next to the full list of 9,277:

Existing customers make up the small remainder of each list.

Open renewals are the biggest live slice of the High tier. If you sell against the vendor, each one is their customer deciding whether to stay.

Closed lost only counts toward the 29% when the loss happened in the past 90 days. Those are buyers who evaluated recently and didn't sign.

The 31% with no deal yet is harder to read. Some are evaluations that haven't been logged in the CRM yet. Some are poor CRM hygiene. Some are noise, accounts we flagged that aren't buying anything. Even then, they show you which accounts fit the type of product you sell, and which job titles get involved when they do buy.

Why we rank the list

What surprised us was how small the share of winnable deals was across all the data. Account by account, the evidence is noisy. Across tens of thousands of accounts and more than 100,000 data points, patterns show up that predict which accounts are more likely to be in a real deal.

That's what the High, Med and Nurture tiers are. You get the broad list, and you know which accounts to work first.

Even with the noise, a list where 3 in 10 accounts are live deals beats cold outbound by a wide margin. It also beats most intent signals, which tell you someone read about your category. A company evaluating vendors in your space is a stronger signal than that.

Read the report

The one-page report, with the full method notes, is here.

If you're curious how much of your competitors' CRMs you could rebuild, talk to us. We'll run it on the vendors in your space.