What a healthy field sales pipeline actually looks like

A healthy field sales pipeline has nothing to do with the shape of the funnel. Every sales book draws the pipeline as a triangle — lots at the top, fewer in the middle, a few at the bottom. Fine as a diagram. Useless as a diagnostic.

What matters is the activity inside the pipeline, not its silhouette.

The four signals of a healthy field sales pipeline

**1. Touch recency.** How many deals in stage 2+ have had a customer touch in the last 14 days? If that number is below 60%, the pipeline is aging into sludge.

**2. Stage velocity.** How long are deals sitting in each stage? If "Proposal" deals average 45+ days, the proposal step is broken. Either the proposal isn't landing, or the next action is unclear.

**3. Stalls by owner.** Sort stalled deals by rep. One rep with a lot of stalls needs coaching. Five reps with a lot of stalls means the product, price, or competition has shifted.

**4. Source-of-truth mismatches.** Is the rep's pipeline number the same as the CRM's? If not, figure out why before the forecast meeting — not during it.

Pipeline coverage ratio is overrated

"We have 3x coverage on the quarter" is a sentence sales leaders love and boards ignore.

Coverage based on stale deals is worse than 1x coverage on fresh ones. Touch recency beats coverage every time. If you have to pick one metric for a healthy pipeline, pick recency.

The weekly pipeline diagnostic

Pick ten deals at random. Not the ones the rep wants to talk about — random.

Ask each rep two questions per deal:

- What is the next action?
- When is it happening?

If they can't answer both, the deal isn't real. Write it down, revisit next week, and don't let it back into the forecast until both questions have answers.