Pipeline Review: Numbers a Sales Manager Can Use

Funnel Economics gives sales managers numbers for the weekly pipeline review and the one-on-one, straight from Salesforce. Per sales rep, they show how far the target is away, whether the pipeline covers the gap and which deals can still land or are at risk. Every deal at risk comes with a measured age statement, its health band.

Which questions does a sales manager ask?

Leading sales reps directly calls for an order in the review. Each question builds on the one before. A gap that is not established cannot be forecast. A list of deals without the funnel behind it produces activity instead of a decision. Five questions can be answered with metrics drawn from your own opportunities.

Where does each sales rep stand, and how large is the gap?

The reference point for everything that follows is attainment and the remaining gap per sales rep. Without that reference point, every later figure is a number without a denominator.

A sales rep with no target on file should be named, not left out. Otherwise the team looks complete when it is not.

Does the pipeline carry the gap?

Coverage belongs on the table as a pair. Nominal coverage divides the open pipeline by the gap to target. Risk-adjusted coverage puts rEFV, the risk-adjusted revenue expectation, in the place of the open pipeline. The finding is the distance between the two values.

A low risk-adjusted value has two opposite causes. If nominal coverage is high, the pipeline is there but does not carry. If nominal coverage is low as well, there is too little pipeline. Recommending a clean-up where pipeline is missing makes things worse.

This question decides what comes next: more pipeline, or the pipeline that is already there.

Per sales rep, the gap is not a planned quarterly target. It is derived from the annual target. At the level of the organisation and the region, where a planned target is the denominator, the risk-adjusted value is called HACR, the Health-Adjusted Coverage Ratio.

Who looks strong on the look back and thin ahead?

CIF, the share of the team's result, measures a sales rep's share of the deals won and the revenue won by the team in one period. PAS as a combined measure multiplies a sales rep's win rate across all their decided deals by their CIF. The win rate, the share of deals won, is here the win rate across all decided deals: won among decided.

These metrics look back: they are calculated on decided deals. Whoever is strong on the look back and has little pipeline ahead risks missing the target. A ranking by what has been won hides exactly that person.

A weakness here is a coaching lever, not a failure.

Which deals can still land, and which are at risk?

The answer is two lists per sales rep, not one ranking. The largest deals are neither the most promising nor the most endangered. A list sorted by amount mixes the two.

The first list shows the deals that can still realistically close. The second list shows the deals at risk, each with its health band, measured on total age against the SLA values of its stage. Every deal at risk gets one concrete action.

The health band comes from SLA Health, a deal's age measured against the SLA. An SLA value is the time target of a stage; what is compared is the deal's total age. Your organisation sets two values for it per stage and opportunity type. SLA Health compares each opportunity's total age in the funnel with them.

Which stage is slower than intended?

Time spent per stage is measured by BPV, the deviation from the SLA per stage. A health band and a BPV are not the same statement. The health band asks whether a deal is old for its stage. BPV asks whether a stage is slow.

When the share of the DELAYED and STALLED bands rises against the funnel's own history, that is a pattern of its own. It is called funnel calcification, when the conspicuous health bands grow. What gets named is the stage in which the over-aged stock stands, not the average across the whole funnel.

Which metrics matter for sales managers?

The largest deals are neither the most promising nor the most endangered. A review needs two lists, not one ranking by amount.

How to get started

Funnel Economics is entering its beta phase. During the beta, you start by running it against a Salesforce sandbox.

Funnel Economics Core is a managed package that runs in your Salesforce org. The prerequisite is Salesforce Enterprise Edition; Data Cloud is not required. There, Core calculates bEFV and a simplified rEFV by health status.

Core ships with dashboards. Among other things, they show how the open deals spread across HEALTHY, DELAYED and STALLED, as a share and as an amount. For dashboard commentary, Core can call a language model. This AI data transfer is off by default and is enabled per org and per user; the package masks personal values before the call.

Funnel Economics Strategist is an optional add-on and not active by default. Strategist requires a per-user authorisation that your Salesforce administrator controls and can revoke. The prepared context then passes through a service we operate to the language model you have chosen, with the names of sales reps and opportunities and record links.

The language model processes the data under your own agreement with the provider. We strongly recommend securing the use of Strategist with an enterprise agreement with that provider, including a data-processing agreement that excludes the use of the data for training. That is a recommendation, not a precondition.

The analyses per sales rep described here, coverage as a pair and the two lists are delivered by Strategist. For sales managers, Strategist is designed to break results down to sales reps and individual deals. Each one-on-one is meant to come with concrete questions to put to the sales rep.

If you lead several sales managers, the page Sales Leadership: Reading the Numbers Across Teams has the matching questions.

Discover is meant for trying Funnel Economics before any installation. It is built on a demo org.