Sales Pipeline & Forecast Tracker

What this tool does

CM8-60 is a working sales pipeline for a small team, or for an owner selling for themselves. You log each opportunity with a stage, a probability, a value and an expected close date; it weights the pipeline into a forecast, shows what is due to close and what has already slipped past its date, and measures your win rate two different ways because the two answers are rarely the same number.

Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request, so customer names, deal values and the reasons you lost stay on the computer you are using — and a pipeline export is one of the most commercially sensitive files a small business holds.

What to log, and what not to

One row is one opportunity, not one customer. If the same customer is buying two separable things on two different timescales, they are two rows. If they are buying one thing in three phases and only phase one is committed, log phase one at its own value — not the whole programme at a probability you invented to make the total look sensible.

Keep the value on a consistent basis. Annual value and total contract value are both defensible, but a pipeline mixing the two produces a forecast that means nothing. Decide which you use, write it in the report notes, and stay with it. If you sell subscriptions alongside one-off projects, run two registers rather than adding the two together.

Do not log an opportunity until somebody at the customer has said they want to buy something. A list of people you have emailed is a prospect list, not a pipeline, and putting it here at ten per cent inflates every figure on the screen.

Stages and probability

Four open stages, then two closed ones:

• Stage — What it means — Typical probability
• Qualifying — A real need exists; budget, authority and timing not yet established — 10–25 %
• Proposal — A written proposal or quote is with the buyer — 30–50 %
• Negotiation — They want it; you are settling scope, price or terms — 50–70 %
• Verbal — You have been told you have won, and are waiting on paperwork — 80–90 %
• Won — Signed, ordered or otherwise committed — treated as 100 %
• Lost — Closed with no order, for any reason — treated as 0 %

Probabilities are set per opportunity, deliberately. A fixed probability per stage is tidier but it lies: two deals at proposal stage, one with a signed budget and one with a buyer who has gone quiet, are not the same bet. Whatever you type against a won or lost opportunity is ignored — those are forced to 100 % and 0 %, so a stale probability can never leak into the numbers.

The weighted forecast

Weighting is the whole point of a pipeline. Each opportunity contributes its value multiplied by its chance of closing:

Open means not won and not lost. Won deals are already revenue and appear under won value; lost deals contribute nothing at all. Lost opportunities are never included in open pipeline value — not at zero, not at a residual percentage, not anywhere. Leaving them in is the commonest way a pipeline report ends up describing a business that does not exist.

Read the weighted forecast as an expectation across many deals, not a prediction of any one. If you have eight open opportunities the arithmetic is honest but the sample is tiny: a single 96,000 deal at 85 % moves the forecast by 81,600 the day it closes or dies. With a handful of deals, look at the list, not the total.

Win rate by count and by value

This tool reports two win rates, and they are different numbers measuring different things. Both matter.

They diverge whenever the deals you win are a different size from the deals you lose — which is almost always. Win six small deals and lose two large ones and your rate by count looks excellent while your rate by value is poor: you are winning the easy work and losing the work that pays for the year. A low count rate with a high value rate is the reverse, and usually means you are writing proposals for small opportunities that are not worth the effort. In the sample pipeline the two rates are 50.0 % by count and 47.6 % by value; in a real one a gap of twenty points is common, and it is the most useful diagnostic here.

Both rates count only closed opportunities. Open deals are excluded, because including them would let you improve your win rate by never closing anything. The minimum closed deals setting stops the headline rates being quoted on too little evidence: below it, the tiles read "—". Segment rates in the analysis table are always shown but marked amber when they rest on fewer closed deals than your minimum. A 100 % win rate from two deals is not a 100 % win rate.

Slippage and days in pipeline

An opportunity is slipped when it is still open and its expected close date is in the past. It is the most reliable early warning you have, and it is the figure sales people most dislike, which tells you something.

When something slips, do not simply push the date out. Ask what changed. If the answer is "nothing", the probability is too high. A deal that has slipped three times has usually already been lost by a buyer who would rather not say so.

Days in pipeline lets you compare your typical sales cycle against the deals in front of you. If your won deals average 60 days and something has been open for 200, it is not a live opportunity any more.

Closing this period, target and coverage

The forecast horizon setting decides what counts as "this period" — 90 days by default, but set it to your month, quarter or season. The closing table lists every open opportunity due inside that horizon, and always includes anything already overdue however long ago, because overdue work does not stop being your problem when the period ends.

Its foot compares the weighted total for the horizon against your target. Compare the target against the weighted figure, never against raw pipeline value — raw value is what happens only if you win every single deal, which you will not.

The coverage ratio setting records how much open pipeline you want relative to target. Three times target is a widely used rule of thumb and only that: if your win rate by value is genuinely 50 %, two times is enough; if it is 20 %, three times is nowhere near enough. Work yours out from your own win rate by value rather than borrowing somebody else's number.

Source and reason analysis

The analysis table splits closed deals by where they came from and, for the losses, by why. Source is the more valuable half over time: it tells you which channel produces opportunities you actually win, not which produces the most enquiries. Referrals and existing customers usually convert several times better than cold outbound, and that ratio should change how you spend your week.

Reasons lost only work if you record them honestly. "Price" is what people write down when they do not know the real reason — if the truth is that a competitor demonstrated something you cannot do, or that you never reached the person who decides, record that instead. Four losses in five saying "price" is a register that has stopped being evidence. The reason section covers lost deals only, so its win-rate columns show a dash: a lost-reason group has no wins in it by definition.

What this tool cannot do

It cannot tell you whether a probability is honest. It has no way of knowing that the 85 % deal has not been returned a call in six weeks. Everything downstream — forecast, coverage, target comparison — inherits whatever optimism went in.

It does not handle multi-currency: every value is treated as being in the single currency set on the Settings tab. It does not model recurring revenue, renewals, churn, partial wins, discount approval, commission or margin. It does not know your delivery capacity, so a forecast it shows as healthy may be work you could not actually deliver if it all landed. And it is not a CRM: there is no contact history, no activity log and no reminders.

Printing and sharing

Print Report produces a report from whatever the current filter shows: header, the six headline figures, all four charts, the closing table, the win and loss analysis, the full register and your closing notes. Print to PDF to circulate it.

The scope line under the title states the filter in force. Clear the filters before issuing anything described as the whole pipeline — filtered to one owner or one stage, the report looks exactly like a full one once it is a PDF on somebody else's desk.

Saving your work

Opportunities, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work, including weighted value and days in pipeline, and covers every filtered record rather than only those drawn on screen. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool calculates from what you enter and nothing else. It cannot verify a value, a probability, a close date or a reason lost, and a forecast built on optimistic inputs will be confidently wrong.

A weighted forecast is an estimate, not a commitment. Do not use it as a revenue figure in accounts, as a basis for a lending application, or as a promise to a customer, an investor or a board without stating the assumptions behind it. Commission, revenue recognition and contract law differ by country and by agreement; this is an internal planning aid, not accounting, legal or financial advice.