No matter which method you use, let's face it, the goal is to determine the Time-To-Money! We'll compare the well known Funnel and Pipeline, and I'll introduce two more of my own creation, the Conduit, and Straw. We'll see how the Funnel provides a 30,000 foot view and how the Pipeline and each successive method provides more drill-down capability.

Funnel
Advantage: A good high-level method for displaying the total possible revenue and forecasted revenue over a fixed timeframe. (Win/Loss and Hit-Ratio are popular Sales Funnel references)
Disadvantage: No indication of the individual revenue opportunity and it assumes all opportunities occur in the same amount of time.

Pipeline
Advantage: Displays individual revenue opportunities, the timeframe for each, and cumulative revenue opportunity.
Disadvantage: Doesn't provide information about what 'stage' the opportunity is in the pipeline, or remaining activities to be completed.

Conduit
Advantage: A good low-level method for displaying the 'stage' of the opportunity and revenue opportunity. Also allows each opportunity to have different lengths of time for completion; color-coding provides quick status.
Disadvantage: In addition to the basic information of customer, stage, asp, and eau it can also track: salesperson, project, part number, etc. It becomes more time consuming to update as the granularity increases.

Straw
Advantage: Very fine grain detail, but quick and easy check box for status of each Work Week (WW). Designed for weekly review with the sales team of the customer status. Because the events I have chosen are essentially serial in nature, they lend themselves to a Gantt chart approach, i.e. the customer can't evaluate a device if he hasn't received a sample, and they aren't going into mass production with qualification, prototype and pilot run. Color coding (green, yellow, red) provides quick status indication.
  Another capability with the Straw is using the Qual(ification) stage to assign Design-win (DW) status. It could be entering Qual, or completing Qual, but achieving DW status is often part of the incentive compensation for sales, marketing, and FAE's. Achieving a particular stage; earlier, or later, impacts the Pipeline and that information rolls-up to the Conduit, and Pipeline. Corrective action for each customer and stage can be determined and highlighted on a weekly basis.
Disadvantage: None.

See Graphics for the Funnel, Pipeline, Conduit, and Straw --> here.

Finally
  Confidence levels can be assigned to individual stages, or the total opportunity. One caution, if your product is multi-source, you may share a socket and obtain some percentage of the business, but if you are a sole-source product, you will either get all, or nothing.
Note
  The description of the categories and/or stages shown in the examples may not agree with each other as these are examples I used with different clients over the past several years.

  Dr. Steve Bistritz has more than 40 years of high-tech sales, sales management and training management experience. Steve co-authored the book, Selling to the C- Suite, which was published by McGraw-Hill in 2010. He is president and founder of SellXL.com a global sales training and consulting firm, based in Atlanta. Visit his website at www.sellxl.com or contact him directly at steveb@sellxl.com.

  Renée Walkup co-authored the book, The NAKED Salesperson. She is the president of SalesPEAK, Inc.®, a sales and customer training company. Her clients include BellSouth, USAA, Cushman & Wakefield, Thompson Publishing, ING Financial Services, Cypress Semiconductors, The Coca-Cola Company, Turner Broadcasting, Verizon-MCI, Charles Schwab & Co., Pearson Education, Hewlett-Packard, Nestlé, Panasonic, and Wells Fargo. In addition, Ms. Walkup also instructs business courses at various colleges and universities. She lives in Atlanta.