The test for any metric
If this number moved by 20%, what would you do differently? No answer means it is decoration.
This eliminates most dashboards. It is worth applying before adding anything, because every metric on a screen costs attention, and a screen with thirty numbers is read as a screen with none.
The five worth having
Conversion rate by stage
What share of deals move from each stage to the next. This is the diagnostic one — it localises a problem instead of just reporting it. Lots of meetings and few proposals is a qualification problem; lots of proposals and few closes is a pricing or competitor problem. Those need opposite responses.
Sales cycle length
Median days from created to won. Use the median, not the mean — one nine-month enterprise deal will drag an average somewhere useless. Cycle length is what turns a pipeline into a timeline.
Average deal size
Won revenue divided by deals won. Worth segmenting by source, because it usually differs sharply between inbound and outbound and that difference should change where effort goes.
Win rate
Won divided by won plus lost — closed deals only. Including open deals in the denominator produces a number that drifts with pipeline volume and means nothing. And a win rate is only readable next to volume: 80% on ten deals often means qualification is too strict and you are walking away from winnable business.
Pipeline coverage
Open pipeline value divided by the target for the period. The common rule of thumb is 3–4×, but the rule of thumb is a poor substitute for your own arithmetic: if your win rate is 25%, you need 4× by definition. Calculate it from your own win rate rather than borrowing someone else's multiple.
The ones to be careful with
| Metric | The problem |
|---|---|
| Emails sent | Measures effort, not outcome. Trivially gamed. |
| Calls made | Same. Rewards volume over preparation. |
| Email open rate | Inflated by privacy proxies and security scanners; not a person reading. |
| Total pipeline value | Grows when nobody closes out dead deals. Rises fastest when hygiene is worst. |
| Leads generated | Meaningless without conversion. A thousand bad leads beats fifty good ones on this chart. |
Activity metrics are not useless — for a new hire, call and email counts confirm the work is happening before results can. They stop being useful the moment they become targets, at which point they measure compliance.
How often to look
- Weekly: pipeline coverage, deals stuck past their expected stage duration.
- Monthly: conversion by stage, win rate, average deal size.
- Quarterly: cycle length, forecast accuracy, lost reasons.
Nothing on that list needs watching daily. Daily movement in any of these is noise, and reacting to noise is how teams end up changing their process every fortnight.
Two of these depend on clean stages and clean records: pipeline stages and CRM data hygiene.