Sales Pipeline

Why it matters

Without a pipeline, new business is guesswork. A weighted pipeline, where each deal’s value is multiplied by its probability of closing, turns scattered conversations into a revenue forecast.

What to track

Stage, deal value, expected close date, and source, so you can compute win rate and see which channels actually convert.

Sales pipeline analysis

Analysing a pipeline means asking five things of it rather than looking at the total. Stage conversion: what share moves from each stage to the next, which shows where deals actually die instead of where you assume they do. Velocity: how long a deal spends at each stage. Average deal size, by source, because the channel that produces the most leads is often not the one producing the revenue. Win rate. And age, which is the one most people skip.

Age deserves the attention. In the largest measured B2B dataset we could find, covering 3.2 million opportunities across 364 companies, deals open for longer than twice the average sales cycle had drastically reduced odds of closing, and 68% of opportunities had their close date moved at least once. A pipeline is usually smaller than it looks, and the difference is old deals nobody has been willing to bury.

How much pipeline coverage do you need

The familiar answer is three times quota. It is worth knowing that this number has no published source. The largest measured B2B pipeline dataset does not report a coverage benchmark at all, and Clari, a vendor with its own platform data, describes 3x as "a starting point, not a standard".

The arithmetic is more useful than the folklore, because you can do it with your own numbers:

Required coverage = 1 / win rate

Three times therefore assumes you win a third of what you pitch. At a 25% win rate break-even coverage is 4x, at 20% it is 5x, and at 15% it is nearly 7x. An agency winning one pitch in five and carrying 3x pipeline is not comfortably covered, it is 40% short, and the three times rule is the reason nobody noticed.