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Revenue & return

Sale

A deal that reached a won stage. The one number in a marketing report that coincides with money — and therefore the one every other number is calculated for.

Formula
leads that reached a won funnel stage
Unit
Count
Direction
Higher is better
Across periods
Adds up across periods
In KO
sales

A sale is a lead that reached the stage the project declared won. The number of sales is where the marketing report meets money: everything above it in the funnel is measured for its sake.

And that is exactly why it so often disagrees with accounting.

What counts as a sale

Sales = number of leads that reached a won funnel stage

A sale is a property of a lead, not a separate entity. The report counts not “how much money arrived” but “how many enquiries made it to the end”, and that has a consequence: a sale inherits every attribute of its lead — channel, campaign, enquiry date, owner.

Where the number parts ways with money

The date of the sale is not the date of the money. A deal is marked won when the sales rep decides so; payment lands later, sometimes much later, sometimes in instalments. A monthly report on sales and a monthly report on receipts agree only for businesses paid on the spot.

Refunds and cancellations. A won deal can move back. If the stage is changed, last period’s number changes retroactively; if a new row is created, it does not, but you get a sale with a negative meaning. Both are valid, they produce different reports, and you need to know which one is yours before comparing periods.

Repeat business and subscriptions. Is a renewal a new sale or the same one? The answer decides both the count and the whole funnel conversion: in a subscription business where renewals are entered as deals, lead-to-sale conversion can comfortably exceed 100%.

Sales without a lead. A deal entered by hand came from no channel. It is in the sales count, it distorts conversion, and it appears nowhere in the channel report.

How KO computes it

In KO sales is an additive metric: the number of leads whose current stage belongs to the set of won stages. Which stages count as won is defined by the project’s funnel, so rebuilding the funnel changes historical figures — not a fault but a consequence of the stage living on the lead rather than in a separate sales ledger.

Next to sales sits revenue: the same set of leads, taken by deal amount instead of a counter. They are worth reading as a pair — the same number of sales at a different revenue means the average deal changed, not demand.

Sales take part in two conversions: key event to sale, which measures how well the team closes, and the overall one from lead, which mixes marketing and sales together. Splitting them is more useful than averaging them: a drop in overall conversion always happened at one specific step.