Pipeline coverage

This makes a good weekly Scorecard row, because it moves when the sales team works and it warns about a quarter that is already lost while there is still time to do something. Pair it with proposals sent, so coverage cannot be propped up by old opportunities nobody has touched. Set the multiple from your trailing thirteen weeks.

Coverage is the most inflated figure in most pipelines, because nothing forces a stale opportunity out of the list. A deal that has not moved in ninety days is not coverage, it is decoration. Add a rule that opportunities age out, and expect the number to drop by a third the first time you apply it. The rule is what makes the row worth reading.

Worked example: A commercial furniture dealer ran at five times coverage and kept missing quarters anyway. Filtering to opportunities with a scheduled next step inside the following fortnight cut it to one and eight tenths. Nothing about the business had changed, but the meeting stopped running on optimism and the team started requalifying instead of adding.

Sources: klipfolio.com/kpis/sales; kpi.org/kpi-basics