• Investment banking is becoming more competitive as new technologies help firms move faster throughout the deal lifecycle, raising the importance of understanding and improving pipeline performance.
  
• At the same time, new technologies focused on data collection and analysis are helping firms develop a more detailed understanding of how their pipelines perform.
  
• This article examines the most essential pipeline KPIs and the new tools leading firms are using to track them more effectively throughout business development workflows and improve on them over time.

Revenue tells a firm how its business development has performed, but not much about how its pipeline is working along the way. To understand the strength of the pipeline itself, most firms rely on a handful of core KPIs: how opportunities convert from one stage to the next, how often they ultimately become mandates and how long each milestone takes. Other measures add further detail, such as touches per stage, loss reasons and the number of new contacts added and engaged.

However, those KPIs are only as good as the data behind them, and that’s where many firms struggle, often because the tools they rely on aren’t built to capture that data consistently. As investment banking becomes more tech- and data-driven and firms move faster through the lifecycle of a deal, capturing that data well is becoming foundational to staying competitive. In this article, we look at some of the most important quantitative and qualitative pipeline KPIs, how to capture the data behind them with the right tools and how that data can help deal teams close more deals—faster.

What your inbox can track

A lot of business development happens over email, and a great deal of important information passes through it. When it comes to measuring the strength of your pipeline, though, two kinds of email data often matter most: how prospects engage with early outreach, and the record of activity that builds up as an opportunity moves forward.

Engagement in the early stages

Not every conversation begins in an inbox, but many do, especially cold outreach. For a deal team, engagement with that outreach usually comes down to who opens, clicks on or replies to a first approach, whether it’s a note to a founder about recent activity in their sector or an introduction to a sponsor or intermediary.

Of those, replies and clicks tend to say more than opens, partly because some email privacy features register an email as opened whether or not anyone read it. The figures are also more useful in aggregate. Compared across the groups a firm covers, such as founder-owned companies in one sector versus sponsors in another, they show where early outreach is gaining traction and where it isn’t.

MadeMarket’s email distributions track that engagement for each recipient, so opens, clicks and replies sit alongside the rest of a contact’s history. For firms running more comprehensive email marketing, Mailchimp and Constant Contact can add more advanced campaign metrics, and both integrate with MadeMarket.

Activity across the opportunity lifecycle

Beyond early outreach, email is where much of the ongoing work on an opportunity either happens or gets discussed, from a follow-up after a first meeting to the email that sends pitch materials to a prospect or recaps a conversation with a client. Because MadeMarket syncs with your email, bankers can log that activity directly from their inbox to the relevant contact and opportunity, without having to open the CRM.

That matters because one of the hardest parts of understanding and improving pipeline KPIs is capturing the work behind them consistently and well. When logging that work takes a click instead of a separate round of data entry, the data gets better, and so does a firm’s ability to track the KPIs that depend on it.

Individual bankers often have a good sense of their own pipelines. What’s much harder to see from judgment alone are the trends that only emerge over time: how the volume and kind of work done at each stage relate to how quickly opportunities move through the pipeline, and how all of that relates to conversion rates. Those trends can help firms find bottlenecks that only become visible across many opportunities, and identify efficiencies at different stages and across teams.

Over time, they also give firms a baseline, showing how different teams move through the pipeline, how much work they put in and how that work translates into mandates. That’s the view a consistent activity record gives the firm as a whole—one with analytical precision and clarity.

Relationship strength and pre-mandate work

In the early stages of the pipeline, there are two ways to think about relationship strength for pipeline KPIs. The first is quantitative, built from how often and how recently bankers are in touch with their contacts. The second, which touch counts don’t capture, is the work bankers put into those relationships before a mandate.

On the quantitative side, MadeMarket analyzes a firm’s communication history between bankers and their contacts to show how strong each relationship is: who at the firm knows a contact, how often and how recently they’ve been in touch, and what prior deals or introductions connect them.

Alongside regular contact, another important measure of engagement in the early stages is the work bankers do to build on those relationships and move them toward a potential mandate. It’s also the kind of work that doesn’t always get measured. That might be an early discussion about a potential transaction, a conversation about an executive’s market that reveals the board’s interest in a next major investment, or a business owner of several decades who is considering retirement asking about valuations in their sector. Tracked consistently, these moments add a useful layer of data on the kinds of things happening inside a firm’s relationships and engagement history.

They aren’t just early signals about potential deals or markers of the work bankers put into business development, though. Particularly when a contact initiates them, they’re also another measure of relationship strength that can be tracked as a key performance indicator of the pipeline: how often contacts come to a banker for advice, and how often they bring an important question that could tee up a future mandate. Whether that contact is a business owner, an intermediary or an investment manager, that measure can show how strong the advisory relationship really is.

To capture this in MadeMarket, bankers can log each piece of pre-mandate work as an activity on the contact or opportunity, using a short, defined list of work types so that entries stay comparable across the firm. Any related material, such as a presentation shared with the contact, can be attached to the same record.

Altogether, touches per contact and pre-mandate work are two measures of the work bankers put into their relationships, and both can be read against the core KPIs of conversion rates, time between stages and time to mandate. Bankers often know where their strongest relationships are. Captured consistently in a platform like MadeMarket, though, this data gives them a deeper view, and makes that view available to the firm as a whole.

That broader view helps bankers and their firms understand more rigorously how the work they put into relationships relates to how quickly those relationships move through the pipeline, and how quickly pre-mandate work turns into mandates. It also gives deal teams a baseline when they first set up these KPIs, so they can see over time whether their engagement with contacts is becoming more or less efficient, and whether it’s translating into mandates faster or more slowly.

‍Learn more: How Investment Bankers Can Use AI to Get More from Their Data

‍Tracking formal and informal meetings

Next to email, a banker’s calendar is one of the most important sources of pipeline data. Every qualification call, solution design discussion and pitch meeting marks a step in an opportunity’s progress, and logged consistently, those meetings feed directly into stage-by-stage conversion, time in each stage, time to mandate and touches per stage. As with email, the challenge is capturing them consistently, which is where syncing the calendar with the CRM makes a difference.

Formal meetings, such as a qualification call over Zoom or a pitch meeting in a client’s office, are usually on the calendar. When MadeMarket syncs with your calendar, those meetings are logged against the relevant contact and opportunity automatically. Over time, that dated record lets a firm see how many meetings it typically takes before an opportunity reaches solution design, for example, or how long passes between a pitch meeting and the negotiation that follows.

Not every meeting makes it onto the calendar, though, whether it’s a coffee with an intermediary that produces a new lead or a dinner where a founder first raises the idea of a sale. Because MadeMarket is purpose-built around investment banking, the platform makes it easy for bankers to record those meeting activities in just a few clicks with structured fields organized around contacts and the long lifecycle of an opportunity.

‍What happened in the meeting

A dated record of meeting activity is useful, but it isn’t the whole picture. Much of the most important information about the strength of your pipeline is qualitative. It comes from a banker’s own reflections or from a client’s feedback, and it explains why an opportunity stalled at a particular stage, why a prospective client decided not to pursue a transaction or what finally moved things forward after a series of slowdowns.

Whether it comes from a banker, a deal team or a contact, that information doesn’t always get recorded consistently. Though a deal team may feel it already understands why an opportunity stalled or why a client passed, recording that information in a central platform turns it into another layer of data the firm as a whole can use to analyze and improve pipeline KPIs over time.

Paired with other data, it gives your conversion rates, time between stages and time to mandate more of the essential context firms need to understand the qualitative side of their quantitative performance measures. It can also surface trends that no single banker or deal team would see on their own, because they only appear across years of consistent data collection from throughout the firm.

That starts with making space for notes under the specific contact and opportunity in your CRM. From there, it helps to translate some of that information into standardized fields you can log at different stages of the opportunity lifecycle. A dropdown with a defined set of common reasons an opportunity slows down, for example, makes analysis far more effective over time.

AI notetakers build on that foundation. For video calls and in-person meetings where recording is allowed, platforms like Fireflies, which integrates with MadeMarket, and Rogo, an AI platform built for financial institutions, can produce structured summaries organized around those same points. Bankers can then log each summary with the relevant contact and opportunity. These tools won’t replace a banker’s judgment about why an opportunity stalled or moved forward. Instead, they organize the basic notes from a meeting and add concrete detail to the record, which gives any analysis of your KPIs more weight and clarity.

Informal meetings call for a lighter approach. A properly configured version of Claude or ChatGPT can do something similar: after a coffee or dinner, a banker records a brief voice note and receives a structured summary organized around the same points, which makes logging it quick and consistent.

Over time, that record adds a qualitative layer to the quantitative one, and it sits right alongside your conversion rates, time between stages and time to mandate. Loss reasons are a big part of that picture. When an opportunity ends, whether an owner turns out not to be ready at qualification or a client chooses another advisor at the pitch, a standardized loss-reason field paired with a brief note captures why it ended in a form the firm can compare. Together with notes on why opportunities stalled and what moved them forward, those records show not just where your pipeline narrows but why.

Over months and years, that gives the firm hard numbers on why opportunities passed. It can also show whether the stages with the longest delays or the most drop-off share the same reasons across teams, which is hard to see from any one banker’s judgment. That’s the kind of insight good KPIs depend on, and it only comes from capturing this data consistently. With it, your analysis of the pipeline gains real weight and analytical clarity.

‍Learn more: How to Build Institutional Knowledge and Improve Decision Making at Your Investment Bank

Looking ahead ‍

As technology continues to reshape how firms win business, the ability to improve pipeline performance with better data is becoming foundational to staying competitive. That’s why the platform at the center of a firm’s business development matters. A purpose-built CRM like MadeMarket, integrated with many of the tools bankers already rely on, gives deal teams one place to capture that data and learn from it.

Over time, that learning becomes its own advantage. The future of investment banking won’t be defined only by the bankers with the strongest Rolodex, but by the firms that understand their pipelines best. By using technology and data to fill in what a banker’s judgment alone can’t see, those firms can turn what they learn into actionable intelligence and use it to improve performance year after year.

To learn more and explore what MadeMarket can do for you, connect with a member of our team to get started with a demo!