Which stage takes the longest?

Why stage duration is the key to a faster sales cycle

Your overall days-to-close is an average of all stage durations added together. If your cycle is 30 days and you want to get it to 20, you do not speed up every stage equally. You find the one stage that takes 12 days and figure out how to cut it to 5.

Stage duration also tells you about deal quality. Deals that sit in “Proposal Sent” for 3 weeks are probably going cold. Deals that fly through “Qualification” in one day might not be properly vetted. Both patterns are problems, and stage duration data reveals them.

The most common surprise: the bottleneck is not where you think. Sales managers often assume the problem is closing, but the data usually shows that deals spend the most time waiting for a proposal response or waiting for an internal champion to get budget approval.

How to measure stage duration in HubSpot

1. 1
   Go to Settings → Properties → Deal properties

   Search for “Time in.” HubSpot automatically creates calculated properties like “Time in Qualified Lead” and “Time in Proposal Sent” for each stage in your pipeline. These are measured in milliseconds.

2. 2
   Add stage duration columns to your deal view

   Go to CRM → Deals. Click “Edit columns” and add the “Time in” properties for each stage. Now you can see how long each deal spent in each stage.

3. 3
   Export and calculate averages

   Filter for Closed Won deals in the last 90 days. Export to CSV. Convert the millisecond values to days (divide by 86,400,000). Calculate the average and median for each stage column.

4. 4
   Identify the slowest stage

   The stage with the highest median duration is your slowest. But also check variance: a stage that averages 5 days but has some deals sitting for 30 days has a different problem than one that consistently takes 10 days.

In Salesforce

1. 1
   Go to Reports → New Report

   Select “Opportunity History” as the report type. This gives you access to the Stage Duration field, which counts days an opportunity spent in each stage.

2. 2
   Group by Stage Name and summarize

   Group the report by Stage Name. Add an Average summary on the Stage Duration column. This shows you the average days per stage across all your closed opportunities.

What it takes to track stage duration every month

The value of stage duration data is in the trend. Did your Proposal stage speed up after you started following up on day 3 instead of day 7? Monthly tracking requires:

• Re-exporting deal data with stage duration columns each month.
• Recalculating averages and comparing to previous months.
• Investigating deals with unusually long stage durations to understand why they stalled.

Or see your slowest stages automatically, every month

Bottomline connects to your CRM and calculates the average and median duration for every pipeline stage. It highlights the slowest stage and shows how it compares to last month.

No millisecond conversions. No spreadsheet exports. You see exactly where your deals are spending their time and whether it is getting better or worse.