Stage Duration

Stage Duration is the amount of time a deal spends in a specific pipeline stage before advancing to the next stage or being marked as lost. Tracking stage duration across the deal portfolio reveals where the sales process slows down: a stage that consistently takes three times longer than expected is a bottleneck that deserves investigation — is it a qualification problem (deals shouldn't be reaching this stage), a content problem (buyers need materials that aren't available), or a relationship problem (stakeholder access is insufficient)? Average stage duration benchmarks, available from CRM historical data, give sales managers a standard against which to evaluate individual deals — flagging opportunities that are aging beyond normal in a given stage and require active coaching intervention.