Claim
Pipeline planning fails when all leads are treated as equivalent. Leads come in three distinct asset classes — Seeds (referral/organic), Nets (inbound marketing), Spears (outbound) — each with its own conversion rate, time-to-develop, scalability profile, and cost curve. A mature B2B company should rely on at least two; single-source dependency is an existential risk.
Mechanism
Each lead type has different physics. Seeds compound but cannot be bought; conversion rates run 2-5x higher than Spears but they require months-to-years of relationship work. Nets scale with budget but hit diminishing returns and a market-wide ceiling on inbound demand. Spears have the lowest conversion rate but are uniquely predictable — output is directly proportional to SDR input, so they are the only lever you can pull on a quarterly horizon. Mixing them in one pipeline metric obscures which engine is broken; running the three formulas separately reveals where to invest next.
Conditions
Holds when:
- The company is past PMF and needs predictable, reportable pipeline math.
- There is enough scale (≥1 SDR, content engine, customer base) for all three to be measurable.
Fails when:
- Pre-PMF — founder Seeds dominate and forcing portfolio diversification wastes capital.
- The product is consumer or PLG-led where the unit of pipeline is not a sales-qualified meeting.
Evidence
"No mature B2B company should rely on fewer than two types. Single-source dependency creates existential pipeline risk."
"Spears [are the] foundation of predictable revenue because output is directly proportional to input. The only lead type where you can directly control output by controlling input."
— Aaron Ross, Seeds, Nets, and Spears (predictablerevenue.com)
Signals
- Pipeline review reports separate Seeds / Nets / Spears with distinct conversion rates, not one blended funnel.
- Each lead type has a named owner (CS for Seeds, marketing for Nets, sales-dev manager for Spears).
- Stage-of-company shifts the mix: early = Seeds-heavy, growth = adding Nets, scale = full portfolio.
Counter-evidence
PLG and bottom-up products (Figma, Linear) intentionally collapse the taxonomy — there is no "lead", just usage. For those motions the three-portfolio frame can over-engineer pipeline reporting where product telemetry is the better instrument. Chris Walker's "create demand vs. capture demand" frame also reframes the same data into a two-bucket system that treats Seeds and Nets as a single demand-creation engine.
Cross-references
- (none in current corpus)