← Glossary Sales

Pipeline

All the deals currently being worked, at various stages, with total dollar value.

Explained simply.

Pipeline is the forward view of revenue. It's the sum of all active deals × their stage probability. A well-qualified pipeline lets you forecast next quarter with reasonable accuracy. A bad pipeline (full of stale deals or unqualified opportunities) produces misses. Good sales leadership spends more time on pipeline health than on any other metric.

An example.

Q4 pipeline: $3M total deal value. Broken into stages: $400k in discovery (10% close rate), $800k in demo (30%), $900k in proposal (50%), $400k in negotiation (75%), $500k committed (90%). Weighted pipeline: about $1.2M. You need 3-4x your quota in raw pipeline to forecast reliably.

Why it matters.

Pipeline is how you see the future. If pipeline coverage is 1.5x quota, you're almost certainly going to miss. If it's 5x, you're probably fine but inefficient. Healthy is 3-4x quota, with fresh inflow each week.