Pipeline generation metrics measure your lead generation strategy’s effectiveness — telling you how well your sales and marketing efforts are performing and what your profitability looks like.

In fact, tracking your sales pipeline metrics assists in closing more deals by giving you insights into:

• Where deals are getting stuck
• Which parts of your sales pipeline management process need improvement
• How well your sales team is moving leads through different pipeline stages 
• And, who your target accounts are so you can strategize closing them accordingly

The best part? Most metrics can be found in your CRM, so you won’t have to figure out how to calculate them on your own.

The trick, however, is to measure the right pipeline generation metrics. Because tracking too many sales metrics can quickly dilute your focus, preventing you from optimizing what matters most. 

So which pipeline generation KPIs should you pay attention to? We asked the experts to share which metrics they track and why to help improve your bottom line and stay focused. Here’s what they had to say.  

11 sales pipeline generation metrics to track and why

The exact pipeline generation metrics you track depend on your goals.

For example, a sales team prioritizing generating leads would focus more on measuring the rate at which they’re adding leads to their pipeline and the quality of those sales leads.

On the other hand, a team focused on improving their close rate would likely pay more attention to metrics like lead-to-conversion rate and sales velocity that indicate the speed at which they’re closing deals.

Before you start adding any metrics to your list, make sure you’re clear on your objectives. From there, cherry-pick a handful of sales pipeline metrics to track.

1. Lead volume

Lead volume is the total number of people interested in your product — making them potential customers to nurture and move down your sales funnel.

Since this metric tracks the number of new opportunities you have in your pipeline, it’s useful for determining the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. 

For example, if you don’t have enough leads at a given time, “[…] it’s a good sign that [your] lead generation plan needs to be reviewed,” points out Will Yang, the Head of Growth at Instrumentl.

At UserGems, lead volume is an essential metric we track for reviewing the health of our pipeline generation efforts. Our Sales Manager, Derek Wang shares, “The total quantity of marketing leads is crucial for us to get more at-bats and increase our chances to have conversations to engage serious buyers.”

2. Total activities

Total activities are all the steps you and your team take to reach out to, engage with, and convert leads. These include:

• Meetings booked
• Emails sent
• Social media interactions (such as likes, shares, and comments)
• Demos given
• Proposals sent

Measuring total activities is essential for understanding exactly what works and how much effort you’re putting into closing deals. In turn, the information shows you which sales activities are driving the most results and which ones aren’t adding enough value. This can help you to update and optimize your sales processes, ensuring you meet preset benchmarks and prioritize the activities that come with the biggest payoffs. 

3. Meetings booked

Meetings booked is the total number of meetings sales reps book with potential prospects to educate them about your product.

Tracking this metric is helpful for:

• Measuring your team’s sales prospecting efficiency
• Setting realistic team goals for X number of meetings to book per month

Brian LaManna, the Mid-Market AE at Gong reviews this metric regularly to set monthly targets for accomplishing the sales quota. Reviewing it will help you set informed and realistic goals that your team can reach based on the number of opportunities available to them. 

Pro tip: Try UserGems’ Meeting Assistant to better engage (and impress!) leads without increasing your workload. Meeting Assistant sends you daily notes about the people you have meetings with. This way, you don’t need to dedicate time to searching for their LinkedIn profiles, job titles, and whether they’ve met with someone from your team before. 

Instead, you can focus on building your relationship with the prospect and closing the deal.

4. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)

“SQLs are leads that have been qualified by reps, for example, [those that] have a budget, authority, a strong enough need, and the timing is right,” notes Brendan Connaughton, the Head of Growth Marketing at Qwilr.

“While tracking Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) is an important input, I believe Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) to be the most important metric for high-performing demand gen teams,” Connaughton adds.

 In short, tracking SQLs is a surefire way to beat pipeline anxiety as it gives you insights into how many qualified prospects are in your pipeline at a given time. 

5. Pipeline generation rate

Pipeline generation rate or lead generation rate is the rate at which your sales team adds qualified leads to your pipeline.

Simply put, this metric is based on how many people your team reaches out to as compared to how many were added to your sales funnel. How you calculate it depends on the way you track outreach, the length of your sales cycle, and what your pipeline looks like.

Tracking your pipeline generation rate is essential for improving:

• The number of deals in your pipeline at a given time
• The processes you have in place for adding qualified leads to your pipeline
• Your sales team’s performance
• Close rate or the rate at which you convert leads into paying customers

No wonder, it’s “one of the most important metrics” that the Crosslist team measures according to their Chief Marketing Officer, Daniel Nyquist.

“I know that if I can’t generate enough leads, it’s going to be difficult for me to close deals. It’s also a great metric because it helps me understand how well my team is performing and what areas need improvement,” Daniel explains.

6. Lead conversion rate

Lead conversion rate or lead-to-customer conversion rate is the rate at which qualified prospects convert into actual sales. It’s calculated as:

Lead conversion rate = total number of paying customers/total number of leads received x 100%

Example: 25/250 = 0.1 x 100% = 10%.

“[Lead conversion rate] helps to track the effectiveness of the lead generation process and identify any areas for improvement in lead quality or sales follow-up,” says Derrick Hathaway, Sales Director at VEM Medical.

Alvin Wei, the Co-Founder and CMO of SEOAnt agrees, “Tracking how many leads we are converting at each stage of the sales ­pipeline allows us to identify potential areas for improvement and therefore optimize our efforts to ensure that we are converting more leads out of those generated.”

UserGems’ Derek Wang explains that measuring lead conversion rate is also useful for reviewing and improving your lead quality. 

7. Sales velocity

Sales velocity, also known as pipeline velocity or sales funnel velocity, is the speed at which leads move through different stages of your sales cycle, from initial contact to a closed deal.

“It considers the number of leads, the conversion rate, and the average deal size to calculate the time it takes to generate revenue,” shares Derrick Hathaway from VEM Medical.

You can calculate it using this formula:

Sales velocity = Number of sales opportunities x average deal size (or average customer lifetime value or CLV) x your win rate/average sales cycle length.

Example: 8 x $125,000 x 0.5 = 50000/26 days = $1,923 per day.

Tracking this pipeline generation metric is crucial for “[…] identifying bottlenecks in the sales process and opportunities for improvement,” Derrick notes.

The SEOAnt team tracks it to monitor their sales team’s efficiency too. Alvin Wei comments:

At UserGems, we use the sales velocity metric to understand our lead quality. “Pipeline velocity tells us how quickly our leads are moving through stages of the funnel. This is another great indicator of the quality of our leads.” Derek Wang explains.

“A higher pipeline velocity indicates that our sales team is operating more efficiently. This could be a result of higher quality leads that have higher urgency and need for our product.” 

8. Pipeline value

Pipeline value shows all the deals in your pipeline that are expected to close in a given period. You can calculate it using this formula:

Pipeline value = The value of a deal x probability of closing the deal = forecasted pipeline value.

Example: $2,500 x 50% chance of closing it = $125,000.

The team at SEOAnt tracks pipeline value to consistently achieve their sales goals. Alvin Wei points out, “The potential revenue of all the leads in the pipeline is central to our company and sales team making the correct forecasts and determining what we need to do to get to actualize that value.” 

9. Pipeline coverage

“Pipeline coverage measures the ratio of the total value of opportunities in the pipeline to the sales quota,” VEM Medical’s Derrick Hathaway writes.

Put another way, pipeline coverage rate is the ratio of the total sales values to your revenue goals in a defined period. That is:

Pipeline coverage = target pipeline for a period/revenue target for the same period.

Example: $500,000/$250,000 = 2x coverage.

Keeping tabs on pipeline coverage is important for:

• Predicting the revenue you’ll generate every month
• Determining how likely you are to hit your sales target

Essentially, “It helps to ensure that there are enough opportunities in the pipeline to meet or exceed the sales target and to identify any gaps or risks in the pipeline,” as Derrick puts it.

10. Dollar value per lead generated

Dollar value per lead generated is the forecasted revenue that each lead in the pipeline would generate. 

“This helps me see how much money each lead contributes toward my goal of closing deals within a specific timeframe,” says Daniel Nyquist, Chief Marketing Officer at Crosslist. 

11. Closed deals

Closed deals or closed-won deals refers to the number of leads you convert into paying customers.

This metric lets you understand your:

• Sales pipeline strategy’s effectiveness
• Sales team’s performance  

At Instrumentl, for instance, Will Yang tracks closed deals “[…] because they tell me how many deals are coming in through the door, which helps me understand whether or not my team is doing their job well and keeping up with demand.”

For example, if your sales strategy for converting leads isn’t efficient you’ll likely have a low number of new customers. Thankfully, making small but effective tweaks to your strategy such as targeting alumni customers (who are three times more likely to convert than cold leads) can help you close more deals.

The best part? UserGems automatically tracks customer job changes, reducing your team’s workload.

UserGems adds previous customers who change jobs as new contacts in your CRM. From there, reps can engage them, encouraging them to use your tool in their new role. And since they’ve already used your product before (and hopefully loved it), they’re less likely to say no — translating to increased closed deals for you.

Take it from the team at SkillSurvey who used this approach to 4x their ROI in two quarters. John Routhier, their SVP of Sales shares, “If you believe in your product, UserGems should be part of your playbook. This channel has a 20% higher win rate than our typical win rate." 

Start improving your lead generation by tracking the right pipeline generation metrics

Remember: tracking pipeline generation metrics is crucial for optimizing your lead gen strategy and sales process and for closing more deals.

In addition to keeping tabs on these metrics, make sure you’re providing your team with the tools and resources they need to add more high-quality leads to your pipeline.

One tool we recommend here is UserGems because it:

• Gives you meeting notes on leads such as their job title so reps can better engage them 
• Alerts you about customer job changes so you can add warm leads to your pipeline  

In doing so, UserGems can help you generate a healthy pipeline and close more deals, faster — the same way as it helped Lattice generate $6.7 million in sales pipeline opportunities.

So what are you waiting for? Book a free demo today to learn how UserGems can help you meet your revenue targets.

Why UserGems

UserGems is a pipeline generation software that helps revenue teams generate and protect revenue efficiently. With UserGems, companies can track and automate outreach when their champions change their jobs, and capture the buying groups to find the warmest path into every account.

Companies like Mimecast, Greenhouse, Medallia use UserGems to reach their revenue goals, quickly and efficiently.