Open pipeline value

Open pipeline value is the sum of the deals still standing: neither won nor lost. It is the number that answers "how much is at stake right now" — and also the easiest one to inflate without noticing.

Add it up by stage, not just at the bottom line

A $70,000 total says nothing until you know where it sits. Seventy thousand stuck at first contact and seventy thousand at proposal sent are opposite situations: one is expectation, the other is nearly finished work. The useful reading is the column.

The three ways to inflate the number

• The zombie deal. Stuck for three months, nobody marked it as lost, it keeps adding to the total. By far the most common cause of open value that only grows.
• Optimistic value. When the field gets filled in with the best-case scenario, the sum turns into collective fiction.
• Duplication. The same customer opened twice, through two channels or by two people, gets counted twice.

Pipeline hygiene is not bureaucracy: it is what separates a number that guides decisions from a number that just feels comforting.

Open pipeline value is not a forecast

A revenue forecast requires, for each deal, an expected close date and a probability — two fields whose upkeep is a separate job that many operations cannot sustain. Without them, open pipeline value is a snapshot of what exists, not a promise of what is coming in. Treating it as if it were the month already sold is the short road to disappointment.

What it does allow is a proportional reading: if the open value is smaller than a typical month's revenue, there is not enough volume for the following month — and that gets solved in prospecting, not in closing.

On CRPRO

The board sums up the value in currency of the deals in each stage, so the total per column shows up without anyone building a spreadsheet. It is a direct sum, with no weighting by probability. Against the zombie deal, you can set a maximum time per stage and get an alert when a card goes past that limit.