Your overall win rate tells you how many deals you close. Stage-by-stage conversion rates tell you where the rest are lost, which is the information you need to improve it.
If 100 deals enter your pipeline and 20 close, a 20% win rate gives you one number to react to. Seeing that 70 of those deals reached a demo and only 25 made it to a proposal points you to a specific part of the process to fix.
Pipedrive has this reporting built in. Read more if you want to know how to set up your pipeline so the numbers are reliable, how to build the report, and how to read the results.
Start with a pipeline that reflects how buyers actually move
Stage conversion rates are only as useful as the stages behind them. Each stage should represent a real step in the buyer's decision, such as a qualified conversation, a completed demo, or a proposal sent, with a clear rule for when a deal moves forward. Stages based on rep activity, such as "Follow-up" or "Waiting," make the report harder to interpret because deals move in and out of them for different reasons.
It also helps to keep the pipeline to five to seven stages. With too many, each stage holds only a handful of deals and the percentages swing widely from month to month.
Finally, make lost reasons mandatory. Pipedrive lets you require a reason when a deal is marked lost, and those reasons explain the drop-offs your conversion report will show. Without them, you'll know where deals stop but not why.
How to build the funnel conversion report
In Pipedrive, go to Insights, click + Create, and choose Report > Deal > Conversion. Select Funnel conversion as the report type.
The report starts with three default filters: one pipeline, deals created this year, and a status of won or lost. The pipeline filter is required, which keeps you from mixing pipelines with different stages. Keeping the status filter set to won and lost is a good default, since open deals haven't finished moving through the pipeline yet and would make conversion look lower than it is.
You can measure the funnel by deal count, deal value, or weighted value. Deal count is the best place to start because one large deal can distort value-based percentages. Switch to value later if you want to see where revenue, rather than volume, drops off.
Once the report is set up, save it and add it to a dashboard so the team can check it regularly.
How to read the results
Each column in the funnel represents a stage and shows the percentage of deals that reached it. Your overall win rate appears at the top of the chart.
Pipedrive treats won deals as having passed through every stage, even if a rep moved a deal to won before it reached the final stage. Lost deals are counted at the stage where they stopped. This is worth knowing if your team sometimes closes deals early, because it can make later stages look stronger than they are.
To find the weak point, compare each stage with the one before it. Here's an example:
In this pipeline, the largest drop happens between demo and proposal. That usually points to discovery quality or poor fit, so the next step is to review lost reasons and a sample of recent deals that stopped at that stage.
Break the numbers down by rep and lead source
A team-wide funnel can hide large differences between reps and channels. Pipedrive gives you two ways to break it down.
The first is to add filters to the funnel report. Filtering by deal owner shows one rep's funnel, and filtering by source channel shows how deals from referrals, inbound, or outbound move through each stage. Saving a separate report for each major source makes the comparison quick.
The second is the Win/loss conversion report, available under the same Conversion option. It shows won versus lost deals and can be grouped by deal owner, source channel, label, or custom fields. This is the fastest way to compare overall win rates across reps or lead sources side by side. Note that using custom fields in Insights requires the Premium plan or higher.
As covered in our sales conversion rate benchmarks, referrals and cold outbound convert at very different rates, so splitting by source is often where the most useful findings appear.
Add the deal duration report
Conversion shows where deals are lost. The deal duration report shows where they slow down, which often comes first.
To build it, go to Insights > + Create > Report > Deal > Duration. The number at the top is your average sales cycle in days, and the columns break it down by stage. With the default won-and-lost filter, the report shows average time in the pipeline. Adding open deals switches the view to average time in each stage, which is useful for spotting deals that are stuck right now.
Reading the two reports together gives a fuller picture. A stage with both a low conversion rate and a long average duration is usually the best place to focus.
Common setup issues that skew the numbers
A few habits can make the report less accurate. Deals that skip stages, for example jumping straight from qualified to proposal, can distort conversion for the stages they skipped. Date ranges that are too short leave too few deals in each stage to draw conclusions, so use at least a full quarter if your volume allows. Pipeline changes also matter: if you rename, merge, or delete stages, compare only periods that used the same structure, since time spent in deleted stages isn't counted.
What to do this week
Review your pipeline stages and make sure each one reflects a real buyer step with a clear entry rule.
Turn on required lost reasons if they aren't already mandatory.
Build a funnel conversion report for your main pipeline using won and lost deals from the last two quarters.
Find the stage with the largest drop and review the lost reasons and a sample of deals that stopped there.
If you'd like help setting up Pipedrive so your pipeline reporting is accurate from the start, contact us.
We're Stamina. We build go-to-market systems for B2B companies: CRM implementation, pipeline architecture and outbound execution. We're a Pipedrive Exclusive Partner working across the USA, UAE, Georgia and Armenia. If your dashboard is full of numbers nobody acts on, that's usually where our sales process audit starts.
Sources: Pipedrive Knowledge Base, Insights reports: deal conversion · Pipedrive Knowledge Base, Insights reports: deal duration · Stamina, Sales Conversion Rate Benchmarks by Industry (2026 Data)
