What Counts as an Aged Opportunity
An aged opportunity is a deal that has been open longer than deals like it normally take to close. Age by itself proves nothing. A 200-day enterprise deal in a segment where the median cycle runs 240 days is on schedule. A 200-day deal in a segment where the median is 60 days is a different animal, and treating both as equivalent pipeline is how a forecast breaks quietly.Aging is relative to the deal's own peer group. ORM groups every opportunity with a machine learning model and predicts a close curve for each group. Those curves run from 1 to 80 weeks, with most of the closing expectation landing before week 12. Very few groups carry meaningful expectation past 52 weeks. An opportunity is aged once it has passed the bulk of its own group's curve without closing.
The 12-month rule
ORM applies a 12-month rule across most customers. An opportunity with no meaningful change in 12 months is not live pipeline. Meaningful change means the stage moved, the close date moved, or the amount moved. Activity logging does not count, because activity is cheap to manufacture and expensive to trust.
Twelve months is deliberately generous. It is a floor rather than a hygiene standard. Deals that cross it are not aging. They are finished.
What aging does to your numbers
Aged opportunities inflate coverage while depressing everything coverage is supposed to predict. They lower realized win rate when they eventually close lost in bulk, and they drag forecast accuracy down because the model is asked to price deals with no live buying process behind them.
| Age against group curve | Read | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Inside expected window | Normal | Work it |
| Past peak, inside 52 weeks | At risk | Re-qualify and reset the date with buyer confirmation |
| Past 52 weeks | Rarely closes | Close lost or move to nurture |
| No meaningful change in 12 months | Not pipeline | Remove from the forecast |
How to manage aged pipeline
- Set thresholds per segment, never company-wide. One aging rule applied across enterprise and SMB flags the wrong deals in both directions and teaches reps to ignore the flag. - Date the age from the last meaningful change. Creation date measures how long a record has existed. Last meaningful change measures whether anything is happening. - Make age a forecast-category gate. An opportunity past its group's curve cannot sit in commit without a buyer-confirmed close date. That single rule strips most of the optimism out of the commit number. - Track close-date resets on old deals. Repeated resets on an aged opportunity are the sharpest form of deal slippage, and they predict a loss more reliably than the stage field does.
Frequently Asked Questions
How old does an opportunity have to be before it counts as aged?
Age only means something relative to comparable deals. ORM predicts a close curve for each opportunity group, and those curves run from 1 to 80 weeks with most of the closing expectation landing before week 12. An opportunity is aged once it has passed the bulk of its own group's curve without closing, which means the threshold differs by segment.
What is the 12-month rule for opportunity aging?
ORM applies a 12-month rule across most customers. An opportunity with no meaningful change in 12 months, meaning no movement in stage, close date, or amount, is not treated as live pipeline. The threshold is deliberately generous, so deals that cross it are finished rather than merely slow.
Should deal age be measured from creation date or last activity?
Measure from the last meaningful change. A deal created 14 months ago that advanced a stage last week is working. A deal created last quarter that has not moved since is stuck. Creation date alone penalizes long enterprise cycles and lets recently created dead deals pass unnoticed.
Do aged opportunities ever close?
Some do, which is why removal should follow re-qualification rather than a blanket purge. Very few opportunity groups carry meaningful closing expectation past 52 weeks, so an old deal that survives should be held to a buyer-confirmed close date before it returns to commit.
Put these metrics to work
ORM builds custom revenue forecast models that turn concepts like aged opportunity into prescriptive action for your team.
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