Glossary
What is sales pipeline?
A sales pipeline is the set of open opportunities a team is working, arranged by the stage each one has reached, so that the total and the shape of the pipeline can both be read at a glance.
Stages describe what the buyer did, not what you did
The most common pipeline defect is stages named after seller activity: "proposal sent", "followed up", "demo done". These are things you can do alone, so a deal can move through them while the buyer is entirely uninvolved, and the pipeline fills with deals that will never close.
A stage should be a buyer action you could point to: they gave you a budget, they introduced you to the person who signs, they asked legal to look at it. Written that way, a stage change is evidence rather than optimism.
Five to seven stages is the usual working range. Fewer, and the stages carry no information. More, and nobody keeps them current.
Pipeline is not a funnel
The words get used interchangeably and mean different things. A funnel is a volume model: how many at the top, how many survive each step, expressed as rates. A pipeline is a list of specific named opportunities and what each one is worth.
A funnel answers "is our conversion rate improving". A pipeline answers "will we hit this quarter". You need both, and a report that mixes them answers neither.
Coverage and velocity
Pipeline coverage is open pipeline value divided by the target for the period. A team closing one deal in four needs roughly four times its target in open pipeline to be safe. Coverage below that is not a motivation problem, it is an arithmetic one, and no amount of pushing the current deals fixes it.
Velocity is the other half: how fast value moves through. Roughly, the number of open opportunities times average value times win rate, divided by the average cycle length in days. It is most useful as a trend on your own numbers rather than as a figure to benchmark against anyone else.
Both go wrong the same way, through stale records. A pipeline that nobody prunes reports coverage it does not have.
How sales pipeline works in a CRM
- One pipeline per motion. New business and renewals behave differently and belong in separate pipelines over the same company records, not in one board with a stage bolted on the end.
- A close date that someone believes. Not the end of the quarter by default. A date nobody chose is what makes a forecast a work of fiction.
- An age on every deal. Time in the current stage is the single most useful pipeline field. A deal that has not moved in twice the normal stage time is not slow, it is usually dead.
- A weighted view and an unweighted one. Weighted for the forecast, raw for the workload. Reading only the weighted number hides how much work is actually in front of the team.
How we do it in Lumenbase
Lumenbase runs multiple pipelines over one set of company and contact records, so the same client can appear in new business and in an active account without being duplicated. Stage age is on the record rather than in a report nobody opens, and Lumo raises deals that have gone quiet before the close date arrives instead of after it.