Must-have sales pipeline reporting for all industries and all sizes (with examples)
Author
Precious Oboidhe
Precious develops content marketing strategies and frequently blogs for the well-known B2B players. HubSpot, CoSchedule, EngageBay, and Foundation Inc. — this is only a small part of the MarTech brands Precious collaborated with.
Reviewed by
Julia Sorokovikova
Julia is a head of sales operation at Belkins, posessing nearly two decades of experience in sales and account management.
Published:2025-04-22
Reading time:9 min
Your sales pipeline is the engine that drives revenue growth. Keeping the pipeline in top shape ensures your organization stays on course to hit its goals. But to understand your pipeline performance, you need accurate and actionable sales pipeline reports.
Yet nearly 70% of the businesses we’ve spoken to struggle with building reliable reports.
“We often see CRM accounts with well-structured reports and dashboards that rely on outdated deals or contact data,” says Tetiana Musina, Belkins’ HubSpot consultant.
So how do you create reports that truly reflect the state of your pipeline? In this article, we’ll share the 9 key metrics we track and walk you through our process for building accurate sales pipeline reports.
Quick note: We’ve built and managed pipelines that generate ROIs of 200% and more. If you want reports that give you a 360-degree view of your pipeline, check our HubSpot CRM consultancy service or .
9 metrics to include in your sales pipeline report (and why)
A regularly updated CRM gives you access to several types of data. But more isn’t always better. When I talked to Michael Maximoff, Belkins’ co-founder, he recommended skipping the noise and “focusing on the top five to seven key sales metrics you can religiously follow and keep updated.”
We use HubSpot at Belkins, so our pipeline report examples are from the HubSpot CRM. You should be able to create or find similar reports on any standard CRM. Here are 9 key metrics Belkins tracks and why they matter.
Total number of opportunities
This metric shows the total number of opportunities created within a period. You can track it using HubSpot’s prebuilt “Deals created” report.
Ideally, you’ve already calculated how many opportunities you need to reach your revenue goal. We determine this number during our quarterly planning sessions. Then our head of sales operations, Julia Sorokovikova, monitors the total opportunity count weekly to ensure we stay on track.
If there aren’t enough qualified opportunities, she immediately flags the issue to the marketing team. Otherwise, we risk shortfalls and may find ourselves in this situation:
“Of course, we’ll cry, and take lots of actions to recover those leads, but it’s already too late. So no matter what you do, you should be at least checking the basic metrics on a weekly basis,” says Julia.
John Sherer, former VP of sales at Lattice, concurs on checking your sales dashboard daily.
“You don’t need to memorize it. But you want to train your brain to start to see patterns really quickly,” says John. “Your job is to find potholes … [and] understand what’s breaking in the business. And the sooner you do that, the faster you can drive change.”
📌 Pro tip: Track opportunity sources monthly to gauge the performance of each channel. This helps you allocate resources more effectively.
Open deal amount
The open deal amount is the total dollar value of open deals in your pipeline. HubSpot shows this metric in the insights summary card above your pipeline. In your HubSpot CRM, navigate to deals, then pipeline. To see the total open deal amount per rep, apply the “deal owner” filter.
Tracking your total open deal amount reveals whether you have sufficient pipeline coverage to meet revenue goals. For example, we maintain a pipeline coverage ratio of 10X, meaning if our goal is $1,000,000 in new monthly revenue, we target $10,000,000 in total open deals.
While the total number of opportunities provides some insight into your pipeline coverage, the open deal amount offers a more accurate picture by accounting for variations in deal sizes.
Close rate
The close rate measures the percentage of opportunities that convert into closed-won deals within a given period.
Close rate = (total number of closed-won deals ÷ total number of opportunities created) x 100
Market conditions shift, which may cause your close rate to change over time. Tracking it consistently lets you identify changes that warrant adjustments to your sales approach. We also recommend monitoring individual close rates for each rep. While this may require some manual effort, it helps to identify top performers, spot coaching opportunities, and set meaningful benchmarks.
Sales cycle length
This metric measures the average time from when an opportunity is created to when it reaches the closed-won or closed-lost stage.
HubSpot calls this metric “average deal age,” and it’s available on the insights summary card above your pipeline.
You can also access the average sales cycle length for each rep by applying the “deal owner” filter. Below is the average deal size for one of our sales reps. Notice how it differs from our overall average.
📌Pro tip: You can create a dashboard to organize related reports into one view. For instance, we’ve organized our most important reports into a dashboard we labeled “Sales Main KPIs.”
This is the average value of your closed-won deals. In HubSpot, it’s labeled “average per deal” and displays in the pipeline insights summary card under “closed deal amount.” Apply the “deal owner” filter to see the average deal size per rep.
Average deal size is essential for calculating pipeline velocity, a metric that tells how quickly a sales team generates revenue. Pipeline velocity provides a dollar-per-day revenue projection, which is useful when communicating with a non-sales audience like product or marketing founders.
Pipeline velocity = (total opportunities x win rate x average deal size) ÷ sales cycle length
📌Pro tip: Your total number of opportunities, average deal size, close rate, and sales cycle length are the 4 key metrics that give you a high-level overview of what’s happening in your pipeline. The additional metrics delve deeper into the top 4.
Opportunity count and amount by stage
This metric tracks the total number and dollar value of opportunities at each stage of your sales pipeline. In HubSpot, this data appears at the top and bottom of each pipeline stage.
We prioritize custom reports that highlight opportunity count and amount in late-stage deals. As shown in the image below, the 3 stages just before “closed-won” in our sales pipeline stages are the topmost reports on our “Sales Main KPIs” dashboard.
Why the focus on late-stage deals? Simple: They’re closest to revenue. Tracking them allows for more accurate forecasting of imminent revenue. For instance, Julia knows we typically have 20 deals in the contract-sent stage. If she suddenly sees 40, she might pop into Slack to celebrate or check if reps forgot to update their pipelines. If that number drops to 10, she knows we’ll close fewer deals than expected, prompting her to investigate why.
Quota attainment
The quota attainment report reveals how each rep is progressing toward their quota. We use a simple bar chart to visualize it. We like this view because it instantly highlights how reps with similar quotas compare to each other.
This knowledge is important because performance gaps between sales reps is a major reason teams miss their targets. By identifying average performers quickly, you can coach them on the strategies used by top performers, narrow the performance gaps, and boost your conversions.
Opportunity count per rep
This metric refers to the total number of opportunities per sales representative. It tells you whether each rep has sufficient opportunities to hit quota. It also ensures every rep has enough leads to keep them busy. That way, you distribute your revenue source across the team instead of relying on a few top-performing sales reps.
📌Pro tip: Factor in your sales cycle length when analyzing report insights. For example, our sales cycle is 2 months. A common mistake is calculating the March 2025 close rate using March closed-won deals. This is inaccurate because most March-generated opportunities won’t close until May. The right approach? Measure March’s close rate in May, or predict it by analyzing leads generated at least 2 months earlier.
Conversion rate by stage
This metric tracks the percentage of deals advancing from one pipeline stage to the next.
We track this metric monthly to compare current conversion rates against our historical data. For example, we know our appointment-booked-to-meeting-held conversion rate is typically 85%. If this rate suddenly drops to 50%, that signals a problem and prompts an investigation. If it suddenly drops below 50%, that signals a problem that needs immediate attention.
Beyond spotting anomalies, tracking conversion rates by stage helps identify bottlenecks in the sales process. Pinpointing where deals drop off enables us to optimize our sales process and increase conversion rates at every stage.
Conversion rate per rep
This metric tracks the conversion rate between deal stages for each representative. Earlier, we talked about monitoring the close rate for each rep, but this is different. It’s more granular since it measures how effectively each rep moves deals through the pipeline. Like close rate data, conversion rate per rep is a brilliant way to identify coaching opportunities for each rep.
If you notice one rep’s conversion rate at a pipeline stage is lower than the average, you can probe their process and coach them to improve. There’s no HubSpot report for this, so you may have to calculate it manually or find a workaround.
📌 Pro tip: Turn your reports into actionable insights by asking 2 key questions:
- For the team: Which metric, if improved, would most significantly enhance overall performance?
- For each rep: Which metric, if improved, will have the greatest impact on <rep’s name’s> results?
These questions uncover the insights buried in your sales pipeline data. As Kevin Dorsey recommends, sales leaders should require their sales managers to define these key metrics. Your role? Ensure they’ve chosen the right one and have a plan to improve it.
Belkins’ process for ensuring accurate sales pipeline reporting
As Tetiana points out, keeping pipeline data clean, up to date, accurate, and trustworthy is a headache for businesses, and it’s the primary reason they struggle to build reliable reports.
Many businesses, especially SMBs, still don’t see the value of organizing their activities in a CRM. But even those that do often struggle with outdated data due to poor pipeline management processes. Plus, their sales teams fail to update their activities in the CRM. This situation creates information gaps that lead to inaccurate reporting.
We faced these challenges at Belkins, too. Michael said it took 4–5 years of religiously pushing everyone to achieve a clean pipeline and instill a culture of pipeline hygiene across the organization. To help you get there faster, here are our processes for maintaining a clean pipeline.
Have a dedicated pipeline manager
Our sales operation team handles admin pipeline-management tasks like CRM data cleaning, building automation, and follow-ups. This allows our sales executives to prioritize interacting with qualified prospects, closing deals, and logging all interactions in the CRM.
Our sales operations team also has a dedicated dashboard with reports for gauging data health and keeping our CRM up to date. For example, the report below shows that 2 deals in our pipeline haven’t been assigned to a business development representative (BDR) for qualification. Sales operations checks this dashboard daily to identify and fix such issues.
Automate as much as possible
“To help sales reps stay on top of their deal records and pipeline updates, we implement automated tasks and reminders to highlight missing or outdated information,” says Tetiana.
We use automation to prompt sales executives (SEs) to follow up on deals that have been inactive for over 2 weeks.
We also have automation workflows to reduce time spent on repetitive tasks. For instance, our CRM integrates with Apollo, which automatically enriches prospect data. We then score the leads with HubSpot before passing them to a BDR for manual lead qualification.
Set aside cleaning days
We dedicate time each month and quarter to data cleaning. On these days, our lead research specialists manually enrich and update our CRM data.
“We re-research our lead database on a quarterly basis because of data decay,” says Michael. “We typically find that about 10%–20% of emails are disqualified or outdated due to job changes or other reasons.”
Set up mandatory fields and rules
“We suggest all sales teams adopt the rule ‘If it is not in CRM, it doesn’t exist,’” says Tetiana.
To enforce this principle, we’ve implemented required fields in our CRM, making it impossible to move a deal past certain stages without filling in the required information. These rules act as a forcing function, ensuring reps consistently update the CRM.
This simple process helps us understand our pipeline data, forecast accurately, and improve our sales team. Contact us if you need help reaching similar outcomes.
Precious develops content marketing strategies and frequently blogs for the well-known B2B players. HubSpot, CoSchedule, EngageBay, and Foundation Inc. — this is only a small part of the MarTech brands Precious collaborated with.
Expert
Julia Sorokovikova
Belkins' head of sales operations
Julia brings nearly two decades of experience in sales and account management. She ensures seamless operations at Belkins through CRM optimization, workflow automation, and by enabling high-performing teams through strategic improvements.
