Sep 2, 2026
Why Pipeline Volume Is the Wrong Signal for SMEs
A £2m pipeline on the board pack feels like a healthy business. In most firms your size it is enquiries with a value and a close date attached. The number counts conversations started. It says almost nothing about deals you will win.
We opened a 30-person firm's HubSpot with 140 open deals and £1.8m of weighted pipeline. Forty of them had no activity in six months. Sixty were inbound enquiries where nobody had spoken to a decision-maker, and the £15k value on each was the sales manager's guess.
The real number, deals with a named buyer, a confirmed budget and a reason to act this quarter, was under £300k. A 200-person business can carry that gap. There is enough revenue elsewhere to absorb the miss.
At 25 people the forecast decides whether you hire, and a pipeline built from enquiries will tell you to hire at exactly the wrong moment. Until you have written down what a deal has to prove before it counts, your pipeline is a list of people who once replied.
