Glossary

Deal risk glossary

Plain-English definitions of the deal risk and opportunity risk terms that come up when a Salesforce pipeline starts to wobble. Updated July 2026.

Signals of deal risk

The measurable warning signs, all of them already sitting in your CRM.

Activity gap: The number of days since the last logged activity (call, email, or meeting) on a deal. A widening activity gap is one of the earliest signs a deal has gone quiet and stalled.
Close-date slippage: When a deal's expected close date is moved to a later date, once or repeatedly. Also called a close-date push. Repeated pushes usually mean the deal is being rescheduled, not actually progressing.
Stage regression: When an opportunity moves backward to an earlier sales stage instead of forward. It signals the deal has lost ground it previously gained, often because a buyer reopened a decision you thought was settled.
Stage stagnation: How long a deal has sat in its current stage without moving. A deal stuck well beyond the normal time in stage is at elevated risk, even if every other field looks healthy.
Missing next step: An opportunity with no defined next action recorded. Without a planned next step, nothing is scheduled to advance the deal, and it tends to drift.
Opportunity age: How long a deal has been open since it was created. Deals open far longer than a typical sales cycle tend to carry higher risk of never closing.
Amount erosion: A drop in a deal's value from its earlier or peak amount. Shrinking deal value can signal reduced buyer commitment or a scope that keeps getting cut.
Single-threaded deal: A deal that depends on a single contact or champion on the buying side. If that one person disengages or leaves, the deal is exposed. Multi-threading (engaging several stakeholders) reduces the risk.
Contact engagement: How many buying-side contacts are actively engaged on a deal. Low engagement, or a single-threaded deal, raises risk. Healthy deals usually show several engaged stakeholders.

Core concepts

The vocabulary of deal risk itself.

Deal risk: The likelihood that an open opportunity will stall, slip, or fail to close as expected. It is measured from signals in the CRM rather than gut feel.
Deal risk intelligence: The practice of automatically scoring every open opportunity for risk using signals already in the CRM. It is continuous and evidence-based, and it surfaces why a deal is at risk, not just that it is. See the full deal risk intelligence guide.
Opportunity risk: Another term for deal risk, framed around the Salesforce Opportunity record. Used interchangeably with deal risk in most Salesforce contexts.
Pipeline risk: The aggregate risk across all open deals in a pipeline, rather than a single deal. It answers how much of the pipeline, in dollars and deal count, is exposed.
At-risk deal: An open opportunity flagged as likely to stall or slip based on its signals. The output of deal risk scoring applied to a single record.
Deal slippage: When a deal fails to close in its expected period and moves into a later one. Slippage is one of the most common and costly forms of forecast miss.
Forecast risk: The portion of a forecast that is exposed because the deals behind it are at risk. Deal risk intelligence turns forecast risk from a guess into a number tied to specific deals.

Tooling and approaches

How the tools in this space actually work.

Deterministic scoring: Risk scoring based on explicit, readable rules rather than a machine-learning model. Every score traces back to the exact conditions that triggered it, so it is fully explainable.
Glass-box scoring: Scoring whose logic you can read, audit, and edit. The opposite of a black-box model. It lets an admin tune risk to their own sales motion.
Black-box scoring: Scoring produced by a proprietary model you cannot inspect or adjust. You get a number, but not the reasons behind it, which makes it hard to defend to leadership.
Native app: A Salesforce app that runs entirely on-platform, with no data leaving the org. Native tools make no external callouts and sidestep the security review that off-platform tools trigger.
Data egress: When a tool copies your CRM data into an external system to process it. Also called sync-out. Native tools avoid egress entirely by processing data in place.
Revenue intelligence: A broad platform category covering forecasting, pipeline analytics, and conversation intelligence. Usually delivered off-platform, and broader than deal risk alone. See how it compares in our roundup of deal-risk apps.

See these signals scored automatically

DealPulse reads every one of these signals on every open Opportunity, scores the risk with transparent rules, and tells the rep what to do next, all natively inside Salesforce.

Explore DealPulse Read the guide