What is Sales Pipeline Reporting?

Sales pipeline reporting is the process of tracking, analyzing, and presenting data about the status and progress of opportunities within the sales pipeline. It offers visibility into each individual stage of the sales cycle, from initial contact through deal closure.

It’s a function built into your CRM, but you might also have a sales pipeline management tool like Gong.

Each pipeline report will include the following:

• Stage-by-stage analysis — Sales opportunities are categorized into stages (lead gen, qualification, demo, proposal, negotiation, and closing). Pipeline reports show how many opportunities are in each stage and conversion rates from one to the next. You can look at the time spent in each stage vs. other details to assess the probability of closing a particular deal.
• Deal age and velocity — You need to know how long deals spend in each stage to single out the bottlenecks and inefficiencies. This is how you move deals through the pipeline faster.
• Performance metrics — Metrics reports highlight the number of open deals, win/loss ratios, conversion rates, and average deal size (among other things). These insights guide decision-making and help to optimize the sales process.

Beyond the report itself, you can use the information within to predict future sales by analyzing how deals progress through the pipeline. Pipeline forecasting will help you make plans and allocate resources according to future cash flow.

Sales managers also use pipeline reports to identify at-risk deals and areas where they need to intervene to prevent lost revenue opportunities.

Synonyms

• Deal pipeline reporting
• Pipeline visibility
• Opportunity tracking and reporting

Importance of Sales Pipeline Reporting

Having a detailed report of all your active deals across different sales pipeline stages brings clarity to your sales operations. Your team can focus on the right opportunities, prioritize their efforts, and take action where needed. And management can take targeted action to boost team performance and move deals over the finish line.

Visibility into deal progress

Sales pipelines are typically divided into stages such as prospecting, qualification, proposal, negotiation, and closing. A pipeline report shows how many deals are in each stage and tracks their progress over time. Managers can see where deals are moving forward and where they’re stalling.

The report also highlights how long deals have been in each stage. You’ll learn a lot about deal velocity — that is, how quickly or slowly opportunities are moving through the pipeline.

If a deal is stuck in one stage for an unusually long period, it might call for intervention or a strategic change to move the deal forward. And if most deals get stuck in a certain part of the pipeline, that’s where you need to streamline the process.

Accurately forecasting revenue

A sales pipeline report provides reliable data to help you forecast future revenue. Knowing how deals are moving through the pipeline gives you a clear understanding of what your sales team can expect to close in the coming weeks or months.

• Your finance team uses this information for budgeting and planning.
• The sales team will use it to set realistic goals and track their progress towards meeting them.
• Investors will look at it when evaluating your company’s health and growth prospects.

So, forecasting is a crucial element of interdepartmental communication and alignment. And pipeline reports make the information accessible and digestible for everyone.

Identifying sales process bottlenecks and inefficiencies

Your pipeline report reveals a few critical red flags as far as inefficiency is concerned:

• Low conversion rates from one stage to the next
• A large number of deals are stuck in a particular stage
• Slow-moving stages (e.g., a long sales proposal process)
• An imbalance in the distribution of deals across stages

Let’s say you’re seeing a huge imbalance between the number of leads at the top of your pipeline and the number of opportunities in the proposal stage. You probably have an issue with lead generation or lead qualification. You’d need to look at why you aren’t bringing in enough leads who are a good fit for your product or service (and ready to buy).

Improving sales team performance

A sales pipeline report often includes comparisons with previous time periods, allowing teams to assess trends, such as whether the number of deals at certain stages is increasing or decreasing.

Whether you’re actively making changes to your sales workflow or you want to measure the impact of a new strategy you’ve already implemented, pipeline reporting helps you track progress, understand the impact of changes, and identify areas you need to improve.

Uses for Sales Pipeline Reports

As far as sales dashboards are concerned, pipeline reports are among the most central to your operations. You can use them for just about everything that requires a bird’s-eye view of your revenue and sales operations.

Tracking sales progress

Of course, the baseline use of a pipeline report is to track the progress of each deal in the pipeline.

This comes in handy for deal reviews, where managers go over critical deals with their reps in one-on-ones or team meetings. By knowing where each deal is, you can explore why they are moving at a certain pace or missing certain milestones.

In a broader sense, you also get a clear picture of sales efficiency. How quickly are your reps able to qualify prospects, move forward with a demo, and get a quote or proposal out to them?

Setting targets and quotas

To set sales targets (in terms of both deals won and revenue generated), you have to consider your team’s past sales performance, the state of your pipeline, future growth trajectory, and the external factors influencing your sales efforts.

As an example, it’d make no sense to set a target at double the number of deals your team usually closes if your current pipeline and previous growth trends show your sales growth is tapering off.

Without a comprehensive sales report like this, you won’t have the information required to determine the “target” number you need to hit for that month or quarter. And that means you also can’t set the right sales quotas for your team members.

Measuring sales team performance

Your pipeline report will show you all sorts of metrics that help you gauge team and individual performance:

• Deals won and lost
• Deal velocity (time spent in each stage)
• Conversion rate from one stage to the next
• Average deal size
• Revenue generated over a certain time period

At the rep level, these tell you everything you need to know about how each individual is doing. At the team level, they underscore successful or unsuccessful sales strategies.

Allocating resources effectively

When your finance team draws up the budget for the next quarter or year, they need to see your pipeline report first. That’s how you justify greater investment in certain areas (if you’re having issues with qualified leads, you could spend more on marketing or lead generation efforts).

It’s also how you plan out how much you have to spend. Increasing headcount? Opening a new office? Switching CRMs? It’ll be good to know whether you have a future increase in cash flow to support it.

Forecasting revenue

Every deal in your pipeline has a value attached to it. The result you get from adding up these individual values gives you your pipeline value.

Using a weighted pipeline, you can get a rough estimate of the revenue you can expect to close over the next month, quarter, or year based on how likely each deal is to close. This’ll give you a high and low end of what you can expect to make, based on what’s currently in play.

Making data-driven decisions about deal probability

Based on historical data and stage classification, each deal is assigned a probability of closing. For example, deals in the negotiation stage may have a higher chance of success compared to those still in prospecting.

Lead scoring models (which you’ll use earlier in the sales process) also help the system determine the probability of closing. If you’ve identified a high-probability lead earlier on in the process, it will consider that score as well.

A pipeline report provides a weighted forecast based on these probabilities. This helps you estimate potential revenue, determine whether to include a particular deal in your forecast, and decide whether you want to pursue a deal or focus elsewhere.

Addressing deal risk and minimizing revenue loss

Sales pipeline reports make it easier to spot at-risk deals and take action before they’re lost.

Let’s say your sales manager reviews the weekly pipeline report and notices several large deals are stalled in the proposal stage. The report shows one deal that’s been there for over 30 days — considerably longer than the 14-day average.

Upon reviewing the report, the manager realizes the prospect is hesitant to move forward because the pricing is unclear and they don’t understand the product value.

With this information, the manager can help the rep take action, either by re-engaging the customer to clarify pricing or by coaching them on how to drive home the benefits of the product.

Elements of Sales Pipeline Reports

Now, let’s dive into the individual elements of pipeline reports and what they mean.

Deal stage

“Deal stage” refers to where a deal is in the sales process. These might vary depending on the CRM you use and the exact process your team follows, but these are the most common ones you’ll see:

• Prospecting (lead generation)
• Qualification (rep confirms prospect has a problem your product solves)
• Demo/Meeting Scheduled
• Proposal Sent
• Negotiation/Review
• Closed Won or Closed Lost

Deal value

This is the amount of money the deal is worth, either in terms of revenue (if it’s a Closed Won deal) or potential revenue (if it’s still in progress).

At the bottom of each column in your pipeline, you’ll see a total deal value. That’s how much all the deals in that stage are worth.

Sales rep

In your CRM or pipeline tool, you’ll see which rep owns the deal. This is either the SDR who generated the lead or the Account Executive who’s responsible for closing it.

Assigning ownership lets you track individual performance and guarantees they receive sales compensation for the revenue they generate.

Close date

This is the estimated date by which you expect to close the deal. It’s not always exact, but it gives you a general idea of when revenue will come in.

Probability of closing

Based on historical data and stage classification, the system calculates a probability each deal will close. You’ll use this to determine which deals are worth pursuing and what revenue you can expect in the future.

Lead source

This tells you where the lead or opportunity came from. For example, was it a referral, inbound marketing effort, or cold call? Knowing this helps you track which lead sources are most effective. And it helps you score leads (for instance, referral leads convert 70% more, and 69% faster).

Customer industry/size/location

These details give you context as to which types of companies and locations are most interested in your product. They also help you segment your target market for more effective marketing efforts.

With this info, when your rep works with each prospect, they can take a targeted approach that feels relevant to that prospect’s needs.

Sales activities

A sales activity is any action your rep takes to move the deal forward. Examples include sending an email, making a call, conducting a demo, or following up with the prospect.

When something like this happens, they’ll log it into CRM. Not every one will update in your pipeline report. But major milestones like scheduling a sales demo or sending a proposal will because they move the deal from one stage to the next.

Notes and comments

On the pipeline report, you can add more context about potential deals if you think of something important that doesn’t fit neatly into any other category.

For example, you might write a note about budget concerns with a potential customer or mention that you have a close relationship with them because you’ve worked together before. These are factors that can help you make more accurate sales forecasts.

Pipeline Reporting Challenges

While reporting gives you unprecedented visibility into your pipeline, it also presents its own set of challenges.

The most prevalent include:

Data quality

IBM found that the US economy loses $3.1 trillion per year because of poor data quality. While your sales dashboard comes from one system (your CRM), certain data points — like deal stage and value — are only as accurate as the rep who inputs them.

Pipeline inconsistency

Crunched for time, reps might input data without following a consistent format. For instance, they might mark the deal as “Prospecting,” while another adds it as “Lead Generation,” which mean the same thing. Some reps might not even add deals until they make it to a later stage, like the product demo, because they don’t think it’s “important.”

No standardized approach

Maybe you’ve established naming conventions. But there’s still a chance reps don’t all update their sales pipeline for the same reasons. One might do so every time they interact with a sales opportunity, which gives you lots of context. But another won’t add any info about the prospect — just the sales funnel stage.

Blind spots

Even if all your reps perfectly follow CRM protocols, you probably don’t get the full picture of what’s happening in your sales pipeline. For example, reps might have their own spreadsheets or notebooks they use to track things they think aren’t yet worthy of adding to the official funnel.

When you’re trying to make predictions about sales performance and pinpoint the best areas for improvement, these make it difficult because they leave out important context for the sales leaders.

Lack of visibility into specific deals

Your sales manager can hold deal reviews and sales meetings for your team. What they can’t do is hover over your reps’ shoulders, knowing what they’re doing with every deal in real time.

This makes it hard to guide them and give them actionable feedback when it matters most. If you’re only looking at the data in aggregate, you can’t see which deals need immediate attention and which ones are going just fine on their own.

Difficulty with large data sets

As your team gets bigger and bigger, every single entry makes your dashboard more complicated. For efficiency, you have to narrow down what you’re looking at. If you’re trying to track too many metrics or don’t measure the right KPIs, there’s a chance you’ll miss the most important info.

Sales Pipeline Reporting Best Practices

To help you overcome the challenges of sales reporting, follow our best practices for sales teams:

1. Standardize data input.

Create a list of rules that every sales rep must follow when updating your pipeline report. For instance, they should always start new deals in the “Prospecting” stage and update as the deal progresses through stages.

2. Use automation.

CRM makes it easy for reps to enter data from their activities, like scheduled calls or emails sent. Integrate this with other tools, like your meeting scheduling app and AI-powered notetaking tool, to automatically capture important data points.

Also integrate it with your CPQ (configure, price, quote) software. That way, when reps send a proposal, the customer accepts it, or they move a deal to “Negotiation,” those changes are automatically reflected in the CRM pipeline.

3. Make it easy for everyone to see.

Put the dashboard somewhere central that every rep and sales leader can access, preferably online. You also want individual dashboards for your reps so they know how they’re doing compared to their quota.

4. Use a template.

Make sure you’re using the same pipeline report format for every deal so it’s easier to spot trends and discrepancies. And make sure that template is easy to read, so all your different departments and investors can understand it just as easily as you can.

5. Train sales teams on how to use CRM software.

It’s easy to find out how to input data into your CRM through a simple search. But it might not be so obvious if you want to run specific reports or automate certain actions. To get the most of your sales technology, start every sales onboarding with an intro to your sales tools.

6. Consider integrating AI software.

Some CRMs use machine learning algorithms to analyze your pipeline data and pull out insights you might otherwise miss — like which reps are top performers or what deals are most likely to close soonest.

7. Use sales pipeline reporting as part of a larger strategy.

Sales analytics aren’t just about forecasting. You can use pipeline data for more effective coaching, optimize your sales process, and identify areas where you might actually be losing deals. Make sure all of this is part of a larger analytics strategy that supports specific business goals.

Pipeline Reporting Tech Essentials

You need a few essential tools in your tech stack to create effective pipeline reports the whole department can use.

Those tools are:

• CRM software — The backbone of your sales pipeline visibility. This is where you enter, score, track, and communicate with leads. You’ll also access this dashboard report within CRM in most cases.
• CPQ software — Configure, price, quote (CPQ) is central to your sales workflow, so you need to connect it with your CRM. Quote/proposal, contracting, and closing stages all happen within CPQ and this integration makes pipeline data for those stages more accurate and granular.
• Sales reporting and analytics tools — Tools like Gong can help you understand customer interactions (see: Gong’s integration with DealHub). And tools like Clari can help you forecast more accurately.
• Data visualization tools — For more complicated pipelines, data visualization can help you spot trends, and big-picture insights faster than a spreadsheet or text interface. Look at tools like Domo or Tableau for easy-to-read visuals that you don’t need a data scientist to understand.
• Sales forecasting tools — Most CRMs have forecasting capabilities, but if you want more advanced tactics and insights, consider dedicated software that can run more complicated forecasting models.
• AI-powered sales enablement — Tools like AI-powered notetaking and conversational intelligence can help you optimize your sales funnel and monitor the qualitative aspects of your pipeline, like customer sentiments, sales rep skills/delivery, and competitor comparisons.
• Collaboration tools — For every kind of communication, whether that’s additional context on a particular deal, insight into a customer, or an explanation of why you think the way you do about a deal, you need collaboration tools like Slack and Zoom to stay in touch.

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