Reading the quote pipeline
The pipeline report answers three questions: what is open, what did we win, and what did we lose and why. This article covers how to read it without drawing the wrong conclusion.
sent after the customer told a rep "no" by phone counts as
open forever and quietly inflates everything below.The report
Sales › Quotes › Pipeline groups every quote by state, over a period you choose:
| Band | Contains | Read it as |
|---|---|---|
| Open | draft, pending_approval, sent | Work in progress. Split it further — see below |
| Won | accepted and converted | Revenue you can attribute to quoting |
| Lost | declined | Deals with a reason attached |
| Expired | expired | Deals with no reason attached — the biggest band in most companies |
| Cancelled | cancelled | Withdrawn by you |
The pipeline value is the sum of the quote grand totals in each band. It is not forecast revenue. A quote is an offer, and treating the open band as pipeline without a probability against it is the fastest way to make a sales report untrustworthy — see Trust your numbers.
Split the open band by age
The open band is three different situations wearing one label:
- In your court —
draftandpending_approval. This is your own latency. A quote sitting inpending_approvalfor four days is not a customer problem. - In their court, fresh —
sentwithin the last week. Nothing to do. - In their court, cold —
sent, no acceptance, expiry approaching. This is the follow-up list, and it is the most valuable thing on the page.
Sort the open band by days-to-expiry ascending and work the top. A quote in its last week has a named contact, a known number and a document already in their system. There is no cheaper revenue anywhere in the platform.
Win rate, and how to compute it honestly
Win rate = won ÷ (won + lost + expired). Three ways people inflate it, all of them accidental:
- Leaving expired out of the denominator. Expired quotes are not neutral. The buyer received an offer and did not take it; that is a loss with no exit interview.
- Counting by quote instead of by value. Twelve small wins and one large loss is a 92 % win rate and a bad quarter.
- Counting revisions. Version 1 superseded by version 2 is one deal, not one loss and one win. Count the deal, not the documents.
Break it down three ways, and each answers a different question:
| By | Tells you |
|---|---|
| Rep | Who converts, and who is generating volume that never closes |
| Segment | Where your pricing is competitive and where it is not — pair it with Segments |
| Product group | Which parts of the range you win on price and which on availability |
| Discount band | Whether discounting actually wins deals. This is the uncomfortable one |
The discount-band breakdown is worth building first. Most B2B companies discover that the win rate at 0–5 % discount is close to the win rate at 10–15 %, which means a substantial share of the discount given was not buying anything. That is the leak described in Raise order value — visible here, per rep, with names.
Expired without a response
The largest band in most pipelines, and the one nobody works. Treat it as three separate problems:
- Expired quickly after sending, never opened. Wrong contact, or the mail did not arrive. Check the contact on CRM › Contacts.
- Opened, then silence. The offer was not competitive, or the buyer's project died. Ask. A one-line email asking why costs nothing and produces the loss reasons your report is missing.
- Expired during a live conversation. A process failure on your side. Revise with a new validity next time — see Negotiate and revise.
Set a rule for yourself: every expired quote above a value threshold gets one
follow-up and a recorded reason. Within a quarter your declined band carries
real reasons and your expired band shrinks to the deals that genuinely went
quiet.
Response time
Time from requested to sent, measured in wall-clock hours including nights
and weekends. Read the distribution, not the average — the tail is what the
market experiences, as argued in
Request for quote in B2B.
Two derived numbers worth watching:
- Share answered within one working day. A single, defensible target.
- Time in
pending_approval. If it is a meaningful share of total response time, your discount authority ladder is set too tight, or an approving role has one person in it.
Framework agreements in the same view
Agreements do not appear in the pipeline — they are already won. Read them next to it on Sales › Framework agreements, filtered on coverage: agreements whose remaining volume is out of step with their remaining term. Those are quoting opportunities that already have a signed price attached.
Next
- Common quote problems — when the numbers do not look right.
- Reports and exports — pulling this into your own reporting.