What it is
Measured. How many days a deal has been sitting in the stage it is currently in. Lower is better. On its own that is just a count, and a count is not a signal. Forty-five days is unremarkable for a large deal in late-stage negotiation and is a serious problem for a small one still in qualification. What makes this value useful is the number it is compared against: how long deals of this size, in this segment, normally spend at this stage. Everything below is about that comparison.How it is calculated
Measured. The count is elapsed time since the deal entered its current stage. A stage change resets it to zero. The comparison is against the median time deals of this segment spend at this stage — not an average across your whole pipeline, and not a fixed limit. The benchmark is built from your own deals that closed in the last twelve months, won and lost, grouped by segment and by stage. Deals whose records do not resolve cleanly are left out of it. The median is used deliberately rather than a higher percentile. The median flags the half of deals moving materially slower than the typical deal of their kind; a higher bar would only catch the extremes.
A worked example: for mid-market deals in negotiation the median is 30 days. A deal at 48 days is at 1.6× — stalled. A deal at 80 days is at 2.67× — severely stalled, and it is escalated.
The benchmark carries its own confidence, and it is published.
Below ten closed deals for a segment and stage there is no benchmark of your own. Beacon uses an estimate drawn from your other segments, always labelled low confidence, and everything downstream is prevented from treating it as though it were calibrated. That limit cannot be overridden.
Where it comes from
The twelve-month window is deliberate. Going further back risks measuring a sales motion you no longer run.
How fresh it is
The count and its band are recalculated on every stage change, and again in a full daily pass. The benchmark behind them is recomputed quarterly, from the previous twelve months. Every response carries two timestamps.as_of is the moment the value describes. computed_at is when Beacon last worked it out. Read both rather than assuming a cadence.
Currency and rounding
Neither applies. It is a count of days and holds no money value.What changes it
The count moves with the clock, and resets when the deal changes stage — at which point it is judged against a different benchmark. The band can move without the deal moving at all. If the quarterly recompute finds that comparable deals have got slower, a deal sitting at 48 days can shift from stalled to approaching stall having done nothing. This is the least intuitive property of the value, and it is the reason the benchmark is published with its own date and confidence rather than hidden behind the band. Because a benchmark change shifts what counts as a stall across a whole segment, a median that moves by 10% or more is held for review before it is published rather than taking effect quietly. What does not change it: deal size, activity volume, how many people are on the deal, or how likely it is to close. The comparison is always to the segment-and-stage median, never to a generic time limit. A request to replace it with one — “flag anything over 30 days” — is declined, because the segment-specific comparison is the entire value.What it is not
- Not the age of the deal. That is the total time from creation to now, across every stage. This is time in the current stage only.
- Not deal velocity percentile. That places the deal in a rank against comparable deals. This is the raw count that rank is built from. The two move together and are not the same scale.
- Not the benchmark. The median is a property of your segment, not of this deal.
- Not deal probability. Days in stage feeds it. A slow deal is not automatically a lost one.
- Not the days-since-buyer-contact clock. Deal health watches how long it has been since the buyer initiated something, which is a different count measuring a different thing. A deal can be fresh in its stage and silent on the buyer’s side.