Exec Summary

Track pipeline progression to:

• Improve sales outcomes
• Identify and fix process inefficiencies

Critical Foundations

• Define clear stages and criteria
• Prohibit skipping stages
• Use factual milestones

Create KPIs

• Create KPIs from reliable stage change data
• Allowing/tracking regressions can be helpful
• Click here for instructions on building a stage progression report in Salesforce

How to Use These Insights

• Create your own benchmarks
• Identify bottlenecks
• Refine your process
• Accumulate data
• Questions? Attend our free office hours
• Redeem a free 1:1 workshop

If we’re tracking all of the right things, why are we still struggling to predictably improve our outcomes?

Because the standard pipeline KPIs don’t drill down deep enough to help us see where we’re leaking opportunities.

What are we missing? Lean in close, because so few companies track this one KPI, it might as well be a secret.

Start Measuring Pipeline Progression

Pipeline Progression gives us a closer look at how successfully we can progress a deal from one stage to the next.

Tracking the rate of success from stage to stage helps us see where opportunities are stalling or dropping out of the pipeline more often than we’d expect.

First, Lay the Groundwork

To effectively measure our pipeline progression, we need a clearly defined process and meaningful stage definitions.

Here’s how to lay the groundwork:

1. Clear Progression: Sales stages should follow a logical progression of the product demonstration and sales process
2. Entry/Exit Criteria: Sellers need clear criteria to know when to move a deal from one stage to the next, recorded in fields on the Opportunity, to guide stage transitions
3. Historical Reporting: History reporting on stages must be available and skipping stages not permitted
4. Objective Milestones: Stages should be based on factual milestones rather than subjective opinions or confidence levels

Without these foundations, your stage progression metrics won’t provide accurate or actionable insights. Many of these foundations are outlined in our RevOps Efficiency Pyramid. 

Creating the KPIs 

Once we have a reliable store of stage change data, it’s possible to use opportunity history reporting in Salesforce to see which opportunities are moving ahead in the process. Your report might look something like this:

In this example, we can see our opportunities that moved from stage 4 to 5, which was 92% of the total that changed during the month.

For this particular company, we had an expectation that 70% of our stage 4’s would move to stage 5. So in this particular example the team was ahead of plan.

We also allowed deals to move backwards in this example, so you can see that one change was back to stage 3. Not all teams allow deals to move backwards, but in this case I think it’s helpful to see a regression, instead of a stagnant deal.

Our friend and RevOps expert from Terminus, Kevin Heraly, created a step-by-step instruction sheet for building this report in Salesforce. Click here to get it instantly!

How to Use These Insights

Once we have our report – and our data – how do we use it?

Here are some fast tips to wrap us up:

• Create Your Own Benchmarks: Use historical data to benchmark deal progression rates
• Identify Bottlenecks: Find stages where deals frequently stall and investigate why. Are those sales steps getting completed? Can we get more granular in what we expect to see which step is failing? Perhaps we’re failing to get a mutual action plan created, or failing to identify the key competitors in a deal.
• Refine Your Process: Consider adding new stages to address low progression rates
• Be Patient: Allow time for data to accumulate and trends to emerge before making significant changes. Adding a stage is a sizable change and takes time to implement and develop norms
• Seek Expertise: Don’t hesitate to seek expert advice or attend our office hours for guidance