Scope: one pipeline — the Sales Pipeline
This dashboard covers one deal pipeline, and the reports behind it are bound to your specific stage IDs. Velocity and flow take as many stages as your pipeline has. The cohort table holds five milestones per table — a longer pipeline gets a second table rather than a shorter funnel.
If the dashboard filter is pointed at another pipeline, every figure on this page becomes invalid — it will still render, and it will still look entirely plausible. A second pipeline needs its own build, not a re-filter.
Closed Lost is excluded on purpose. It is an exit, not forward progress, and counting it as a milestone would make the funnel look like it converts in both directions.
Velocity: how long deals sit in each stage
Median time a deal spends in each stage, counting only deals that have actually left the stage — a deal still parked somewhere hasn't finished its dwell yet, so including it would understate the wait.
Read the median, not the average. A handful of deals sit in a stage for years and drag the average somewhere no real deal lives. Both are shown so you can see the gap; the gap itself tells you how long the tail is.
No date window is applied here — this uses every completed dwell on record, so the median is stable rather than a noisy read on the last few months.
Median time from created to signature is 57 days. 6 + 12 + 21 + 18. That single number sets every window on this dashboard, and it is the number to hold on to when you read section 3 — because the cohort there starts at 60 days old, which is barely one full cycle. The gap is the second finding: Demo Scheduled has a 12-day median against a 2.4-month average. The typical deal moves in under a fortnight; a tail of stalled records drags the mean out six-fold. Anyone quoting the average has been quoting the tail.
Flow counts: volume crossing each milestone (never divide these)
How many deals crossed each milestone in a rolling window — each stage counted by its own entry date, 30 to 120 days ago. The near edge is set back a full sales cycle so deals still mid-flight aren't counted as though they'd finished.
The crucial property: the deals behind each count are not the same deals. A deal that hit "Demo Scheduled" in the last few months isn't necessarily one that was a "Qualified Lead" in that same window — a lead from six months ago could be signing today. These tiles measure throughput at each stage right now, nothing more.
Never divide two flow counts to get a conversion rate. Numerator and denominator are different populations, so the answer is meaningless and can exceed 100%. For real conversion, use the cohort section below.
Two places on this row where a later stage outruns an earlier one — and both are why these tiles are walled off from section 3.
| If you divided these two… | You would report | What it actually means |
|---|---|---|
| Demo Scheduled (88) ÷ Qualified Lead (78) | 113% | Deals demoed this quarter that were qualified last quarter. |
| Closed Won (6) ÷ Proposal Sent (4) | 150% | Deals signing now off proposals sent before the window opened. |
Neither figure is a finding about your sales team, and nothing is wrong with the data. The counts simply do not nest, because each one describes a different set of deals. Any spreadsheet that divides them will produce a confident, wrong answer — and a rate over 100% is the lucky case, because at least it is obviously broken. The dangerous ones are the divisions that land on a believable number.
Cohort conversion: the real drop-off rates
One group of deals defined by a shared starting event — every Sales Pipeline deal created 60 to 120 days ago — followed forward to see what fraction reached each later stage. The crucial property: it is the same set of deals the whole way down. Every later count is a subset of the starting group, so the rate can never exceed 100%, and it answers the real question: of these specific leads, what share went on to sign?
Each stage asks whether a deal reached that stage or any later one, so a deal that skipped ahead still counts and the numbers only shrink down the funnel. Rates are cumulative, not step-wise: one step's rate is the ratio of two consecutive columns.
The drawback, and it matters here: this view lags by one sales cycle, so the later stages are under-reported. A deal created 60 days ago has had barely one median cycle to finish. Read the bottom of this funnel as a floor, not a result.
cumulative % of the cohort reaching that stage or beyondbelow the maturation floor — see the drawback note above
Swipe the table sideways for the rest of the columns →
| Step | Of the previous stage | Step rate | Deals | Cumulative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Created → Demo Scheduled | of all 124 created | 76.6% | 95 | 76.61 |
| Demo Scheduled → Post-Demo | of those that got a demo | 56.8% | 54 | 43.55 |
| Post-Demo → Proposal Sent | of those that got follow-up | 5.6% | 3 | 2.42 |
| Proposal Sent → Closed Won | of those that got a proposal | 66.5% | 2 | 1.61 |
FaeWorks — Lifecycle Conversion Dashboard · sample · fictional portal · illustrative data · 2026-09-03