Coverage is the simplest number on this page and the easiest to fool yourself with. It looks healthy right up to the last week of the quarter, and then a third of it turns out to have been dead for a month.
Open pipeline in the period, divided by quota for the period.
Coverage only means something against your real win rate. If you win one in three, 3x coverage is break-even arithmetic, not comfort. If you win one in five, 3x is a miss you cannot see yet.
3x to 4x is the working benchmark for a team winning around a third. Below 3x you are forecasting a wish. Above 5x, look closer, because it usually means dead deals are being carried rather than a genuinely rich quarter.
Carrying stalled deals. A deal nobody has heard from in six weeks is not pipeline, it is a story. Age every opportunity and be ruthless, because inflated coverage is worse than low coverage. Low coverage makes you act. Inflated coverage makes you relax.
Here is the part most people miss. Coverage is not only a volume problem. Deals stall because the buyer has not been given a reason to believe, and a stalled deal sits in the pipeline inflating the number before it quietly dies at quarter end. Fix the belief and two things happen: coverage becomes honest, and you need less of it, because more of what is in there actually closes.
Worked example
| Quota for the quarter | $1,200,000 |
| Open pipeline | $4,200,000 |
| Coverage | 3.5x |
Looks fine. Now age it.
Strip out everything untouched for six weeks and coverage often falls to 2.1x. That is the real number, and it is the one that decides whether you make the quarter.
No single number tells you much. Together they tell you where the trust is leaking and what it costs.
The Trust Diagnostic takes four minutes and costs nothing. The calculator on the finance page prices your own leak. Neither one asks for an email.
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