Pipeline stage

A stage is well defined when two people looking at the same deal put it in the same place without discussing it. That requires the criterion to be an observable event — a meeting held, a specification sent, a proposal opened, terms returned — rather than a state of mind like “interested” or “warm”.

Stages should also be few. Five or six that everyone applies identically forecast better than twelve applied loosely, because the value of the model is in the transition rates between stages, and a rate computed from an inconsistently applied stage is noise with a percentage sign on it.

Stages that describe the seller's confidence

“Qualified”, “interested”, “hot” are unfalsifiable, so deals sit in them indefinitely and the forecast becomes a mood. Every stage should name an event with a date, and a deal that has not moved in twice the median stage duration should be surfaced automatically rather than discovered at quarter end.

Lead

A contact who has given permission to be contacted about a specific thing. Not a customer, not a prospect, and not a metric a business should be run on.

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MQL and SQL

Two agreed thresholds on the same contact: one that marketing will vouch for, and one that sales has accepted and is working.

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Conversion rate

The share of a defined population that completed a defined action — meaningless until both the population and the action are stated.

All forty-five termsWhat this is regulated by in the UAE

Is this one right in your own numbers?

The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.