Having a full sales pipeline does not guarantee success. In fact, the opposite is often true: an overcrowded, disorganized or poorly qualified funnel can be a source of false expectations, sales attrition and wrong decisions.
Assessing pipeline health is not just about seeing how many deals there are. It's about understanding how the business process flows, how close you are to closing, and what obstacles are preventing prospects from moving forward. Here are 6 key indicators that you should be reviewing every week, with practical recommendations for interpreting and acting on them.
This indicator tells you how many opportunities advance from one stage to another in the sales pipeline. But beyond the number itself, its real value lies in detecting where your process is stagnating.
For example, if in a month 100 leads enter the "First contact" stage and only 20 reach the "Proposal sent" stage, you have a conversion rate of 20% in that stage. If of those 20, only 2 close, your final conversion rate is 2%.
Stages with low conversion (<15%) may indicate qualification issues, poor segmentation or lack of follow-up.
Stages with very high conversion (>80%) could hide unnecessary jumps or poorly defined stages (too short or automatic).
Benchmark by product or service type.
Use funnel reports in your CRM (like the business funnels in HubSpot) to visualize the "bottlenecks" clearly.
A healthy pipeline moves. If opportunities spend too much time in one stage, it's a sign of friction, customer indecision, or salesperson inaction.
For each stage, take the average number of days opportunities spend before moving forward or exiting. Example: If "Negotiation" averages 21 days, and your entire sales cycle is 30, something is wrong.
Stagnation in "Proposal Submitted" may indicate lack of follow-up or uncompetitive pricing.
Long retention in "Qualification" may be a symptom of bad leads or lack of key information.
Set up automatic alerts to detect deals that exceed the standard time on a stage.
Support your team with automated follow-up sequences that push for action.
The average economic value of open opportunities is a good thermometer of whether your pipeline is aligned with your revenue goals.
You can have many opportunities, but if each one represents a low amount, the effort does not translate into profitability. On the other hand, a pipeline with few but high-value deals may justify a longer, consultative approach.
Compare average size by acquisition channel (organic, referrals, outbound).
Review monthly variations: a sustained drop may indicate that you are attracting smaller or less profitable profiles.
Adjust your lead scoring to prioritize leads with higher potential value.
Review frequent discounts: are you lowering your price too much to close?
This indicator measures how many active opportunities you have in your pipeline, but be careful: it is not only about quantity, but also about relevance and timeliness.
Inactive opportunities (no movement in 15-30 days) artificially inflate your pipeline.
A very full pipeline can mean lack of debugging or focus, which affects the effectiveness of the team.
If you have 150 open opportunities but 60 have not been updated in over 3 weeks, you are not working with a real pipeline, but a statistical illusion.
Create custom views per salesperson to manage only active opportunities.
Automate cleanup tasks: move inactive opportunities to "Lost" with an explanatory note or create a "Stalled" stage.
This is the golden indicator. Your win rate reflects how efficient your sales process is at converting opportunities into actual sales.
(Number of deals won / Total deals closed) x 100
Example: If in a quarter you close 25 out of 100 deals, your win rate is 25%.
A low win rate (<15%) may be due to poorly qualified leads, poor follow-up or poor timing.
A high win rate (>40%) may indicate that the team is only working with "safe" opportunities, losing volume.
Analyze your win rate by salesperson, inbound channel, and deal size.
Align marketing and sales in defining the MQL: are they passing ready leads, or just volume?
This is your financial thermometer. It not only measures how much you could close, but how realistic your current projection is compared to your goals.
It's not enough to add up the value of all open deals. You need to weight them according to their stage:
"Negotiation" might have a 70% chance.
"Initial contact", only 10%.
Multiply each deal by its probability and add up the total.
Use forecasting tools integrated into your CRM (such as HubSpot's "Deal Forecast Reports").
Regularly review and adjust the probabilities per stage according to your actual closing history.
Having real visibility into your sales pipeline is not a luxury: it's a necessity for any marketing or sales team that wants to make decisions based on data, not assumptions.
With these six indicators you can leave intuition behind and start working with a clear, actionable diagnosis shared by the whole team.
Because when you know what's going on in your pipeline, you can stop putting out fires... and start growing with intention.