How much revenue can you expect next week, next month or next quarter? Pipeline projections, also called pipeline forecasting, answer that from the deals already in your pipeline. Use them to forecast sales, plan your budget, and decide where your team's time goes. In this lesson, you'll set up your deals for forecasting and build a view that shows what's likely to close.
Not every opportunity closes, so adding up the full value of every deal overstates what's coming. A weighted pipeline fixes that. Each deal's value is weighted by how likely you are to win it. For example, a ten-thousand-dollar deal with a 25 percent chance of closing counts as twenty-five hundred. Deals further along in your process are usually more likely to close, so they count for more.
Deals come with the fields you need. Sales Stage shows where a deal sits in your process. Deal Value is your best estimate of what it's worth if it closes. Expected Win % is how likely you are to win it. Expected close date is when you think it will close. And Ontraport calculates the Weighted Deal Value for you from Deal Value and Expected Win %. If you don't see Deals in your navigation bar, click your profile icon, then Apps, and turn it on. Apps need a Dynamic CMS package.
Once a deal qualifies, your rep fills in its Deal Value and Expected Win %. Base the percentage on past results, not gut feel. For example, if about three out of four deals like this one end up closing, set it to 75 percent. When either value is updated, the Calculate Weighted Value automation runs and updates the deal's weighted value. Ontraport installs that automation when you turn on Deals, along with others that keep fields like Actual Close Date and Recent Activity up to date.
If you know your close rate at each stage, you can take the guesswork out completely. Build an automation that sets Expected Win % whenever a deal's Sales Stage changes. Moving a deal's card in Card View updates its Sales Stage, and that can trigger an automation tied to the change. Then every rep's deals are weighted the same way, and your forecast is more reliable.
Deals already comes with two groups for this. Expected to close soon shows deals with an expected close date in the next two weeks. Expected close dates sorts every deal that has a close date into columns by Expected Close Timeframe. For a custom window, build your own group. Go to Deals and click New group. Name it something like "Deals closing this week." For the first condition, choose Expected close date, On or before, 7 days from now. Click Add new condition, then choose Expected close date, On or after, Today. Click Save. To look further ahead, use a later date in the first condition, like 30 or 90 days from now.
In that group, click the column editor button and add Deal Value and Weighted Deal Value as columns. Click a column heading to sort by it. Deal Value shows the best case. The weighted values show what you can realistically expect. Add them up for the period, and that's your projection.
When you save the group, choose its permissions, so your whole team can use the same view or only you can see it.
You can open the same group in Card View. Click the gear, add Weighted Deal Value to your cards, and use Sort Cards By to put the biggest deals at the top. Card View settings are saved for each user and each group, so every rep can keep their own forecast view. Another useful group shows deals won in the past seven days, so you can see how you're tracking.
Because weighted value accounts for the odds of winning, it's the number to plan with. Compare it with your revenue goals. For example, if you're launching an ad campaign next month and your projection falls well short of your goal, that's a sign to push the campaign harder.
So: fill in Deal Value and Expected Win % on every deal, let Ontraport calculate the weighted value, and group your deals by Expected close date to see what's coming and when. Next up: how tasks work, so your team follows up on every deal.