Sales Pipeline Reporting: What Actually Matters

You have a CRM. Deals are in it. Some are marked “proposal sent,” some are “negotiating,” and a handful have been sitting in “interested” since March. Your total pipeline says $1.2 million. Your gut says it’s more like $400K if you’re lucky.

Your gut is probably closer to the truth. But it shouldn’t have to be.

Sales pipeline reporting exists to answer one question: will we hit our revenue target? Not “how many deals do we have” or “how much is in the pipeline.” The question that matters is whether enough of the right deals will close, at the right time, to keep the business healthy.

Pipeline Coverage: Your Early Warning System

Pipeline coverage ratio is the single most useful sales metric most businesses don’t track. It tells you whether you have enough opportunities to hit your target, even after the inevitable losses.

How to calculate it: Total pipeline value / revenue target for the period.

If your revenue target for the quarter is $500,000 and your total pipeline is $1,500,000, your coverage ratio is 3:1.

• Below 2:1 — You’re almost certainly going to miss target. Not enough volume to absorb the deals that will stall, delay, or disappear.
• 2:1 to 3:1 — Tight, but achievable if your close rates are healthy and your pipeline is clean.
• 3:1 to 4:1 — Comfortable. This is where most healthy businesses sit.
• Above 5:1 — Your pipeline is probably inflated with deals that will never close.

Conversion Rates by Stage

Your overall close rate is a useful headline number. Conversion rates by stage are where the diagnostic value lives.

Stage	Example Conversion	What It Tells You
Lead to Qualified	40%	Are you attracting the right enquiries?
Qualified to Quote Sent	75%	Are qualified leads getting quoted promptly?
Quote Sent to Negotiation	50%	Are your quotes competitive and well-presented?
Negotiation to Won	60%	Are you closing effectively once in discussion?

When you break conversion down by stage, you stop guessing where deals are dying and start knowing. If your lead-to-qualified rate is strong but quote-sent-to-negotiation is weak, the problem isn’t lead generation — it’s your quoting process. Maybe quotes go out too slowly, pricing is off, or the proposal doesn’t communicate value.

Each stage transition answers a different question about your business. The overall close rate hides which question needs answering.

Pipeline Velocity: How Fast Money Moves

Pipeline velocity measures how quickly deals convert to revenue. It combines four factors into one number.

The formula: (Number of deals x average deal value x win rate) / average sales cycle length in days.

For example: 40 deals x $25,000 average value x 30% win rate / 45-day average cycle = $6,667 per day in expected revenue.

This matters because two pipelines can look identical in value but move at completely different speeds. If your average sales cycle stretches from 30 days to 60 days — perhaps because quotes are sitting unactioned or follow-ups are slipping — your velocity halves.

The lever most businesses ignore is sales cycle length. Sending quotes faster, following up sooner, removing friction from the decision process — these all shorten the cycle without requiring more leads. It’s often the cheapest way to increase revenue.

Weighted Pipeline: A Smarter Forecast

A raw pipeline total treats every deal equally. A deal you quoted yesterday and a deal the customer verbally accepted are both just “pipeline.” That’s obviously misleading.

Weighted pipeline assigns a probability to each deal based on its stage, then calculates the expected value.

Stage	Deal Value	Probability	Weighted Value
Initial enquiry	$80,000	10%	$8,000
Qualified	$45,000	25%	$11,250
Quote sent	$60,000	40%	$24,000
Negotiating	$35,000	70%	$24,500
Verbal commitment	$50,000	90%	$45,000
Total	$270,000		$112,750

The raw pipeline says $270,000. The weighted pipeline says $112,750. The weighted number is much closer to what you’ll actually collect.

Setting stage probabilities: Use your historical data. If 30% of deals that reach “quote sent” eventually close, that’s your probability for that stage. Don’t guess. Don’t use generic benchmarks. Your business, your market, your close rates.

Getting Your Pipeline Data Right

None of this reporting works if the underlying data is messy. Fix the basics first:

Define your stages clearly. Every person on your team should move a deal to the same stage under the same circumstances. “Qualified” should mean the same thing to everyone. Write it down.

Set rules for stale deals. Any deal that hasn’t moved stages in 30 days should be reviewed. Either move it forward, move it back, or mark it lost. Dead deals inflating your pipeline corrupt every metric downstream.

Record actual close dates and lost reasons. You need historical data to calculate meaningful conversion rates and probabilities. Start recording now — in three months you’ll have enough to make these metrics reliable.

Start With These Three Numbers

If you track nothing else, track these:

1. Pipeline coverage ratio. Tells you if you have enough opportunities to hit target. Check weekly.
2. Average sales cycle length. Tells you how fast money moves. Check monthly.
3. Stage conversion rates. Tells you where deals are dying. Check monthly.

These three metrics, tracked consistently, will give you more forecasting clarity than any amount of gut feeling or Monday morning sales meetings. They won’t replace judgement — but they’ll make sure your judgement is informed by reality rather than optimism.