Before your next forecast call, spend fifteen minutes running five reports. They'll tell you exactly how much of your pipeline is real — and how much is accumulated neglect wearing a dollar sign.
Report 1: Close dates in the past (2 minutes)
Open opportunities, close date < today. This number should be zero — it's trivially preventable with one validation rule — and it almost never is. Every deal on this list is a record nobody is maintaining, sitting inside your coverage ratio.
Report 2: No activity in 30+ days (3 minutes)
Open opps where the last activity date is more than 30 days old. These are zombie deals: they pad coverage, cheer up dashboards, and close at rates near zero. In the orgs I audit, this is routinely 20–40% of open pipeline.
Report 3: Placeholder amounts (2 minutes)
Open opps where amount is null, zero, or unchanged since the day the record was created. Weighted pipeline built on placeholder amounts is fiction with decimal points.
Report 4: Stage distribution (3 minutes)
Pipeline by stage. If one vaguely named stage ("Negotiation," "Proposal") holds half your pipeline, your stages are activities, not exit criteria — and no two reps mean the same thing by them. Ask two reps to define the crowded stage; compare answers. That gap is your forecast error.
Report 5: Serial slippers (5 minutes)
Close-date field history for deals that slipped three or more times. (If field history tracking isn't on for close date, turn it on today — you can't manage what you don't record.) Each slip is a rep deferring a loss they already know happened.
What to do with the numbers
Add up reports 1–3 as a percentage of open pipeline. Under 10%: healthy, keep the weekly cadence. 10–25%: your forecast has a material error bar — clean before you re-plan. Over 25%: your coverage ratio is a work of fiction, and every decision built on it (hiring, spend, board guidance) inherits the error.
The fix isn't a heroic one-time cleanup — it's a nightly sweep, a Monday digest, and a weekly meeting where every flagged deal gets a decision. That system is exactly what the Pipeline Hygiene Playbook lays out, and the nightly/Monday parts are what Soleil's agents automate from $300/month.
Get the free Pipeline Hygiene Audit
Read-only, no install, no changes — a written findings report on your org within days, whether or not we ever work together.
Book a free callFrequently asked questions
How do I check pipeline quality in Salesforce?
Run five reports: open opportunities with close dates in the past, opps with no activity in 30+ days, opps with empty or unchanged amounts, pipeline distribution by stage, and close-date field history for deals that slipped 3+ times. Together they show how much of your coverage is real.
What percentage of pipeline is usually stale?
In the orgs I audit, 20–40% of open pipeline typically shows no activity in 30+ days — meaning reported coverage ratios overstate reality by up to nearly half.