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)