Deals and accounts go backwards in the pipeline more often than reports show. The Ratchet Rate counts how much forward movement still holds 90 days later.
Accounts slip back when the signal that moved them fades before the buying group is reached, when evaluation never reaches the people who approve budget, or when a lead is handed over without its evidence. We measure it with the Ratchet Rate, the share of accounts still at a stage or beyond 90 days after reaching it.
Deals go backwards in the pipeline far more often than a monthly report suggests, because most reports count how many accounts moved forward and never check how many of them fell back afterwards. An account that reached evaluation in March and went quiet by June still shows up as March progress, so a team can report steady forward movement for a year while the same accounts cycle in and out of the same stages.
We measure this with what we call the Ratchet Rate: the share of accounts that, once advanced to a stage of the acquisition pipeline, have not slipped back to an earlier stage 90 days later. The name comes from the ratchet in the Torke mark, a part that only turns one way. A high Ratchet Rate means progress holds, and a low one means the program is pushing accounts forward without anything to keep them there.
The acquisition pipeline we track has five stages, Discovery, Timing, Evaluation, Qualification and Handover, and accounts slip between them for a handful of recurring reasons. The signal that moved an account to Timing faded before anyone in the buying group was reached. Evaluation reached the engineers but never the people in operations or finance who approve the budget, so the conversation stalled when it reached them. Or a lead was handed over without its evidence and sat untouched in the CRM until the account cooled. Each reason leaves a different trace, which is why the rate is worth reading stage by stage.
Calculating it takes a stage history, which most CRMs keep if lifecycle stages are set up properly, as our Revenue Operations practice sets them. Take every account that entered a given stage during one month. Ninety days later, count how many are still at that stage or further along, and divide by the number that entered. Do this for each stage separately, because a strong rate at Discovery and a weak one at Evaluation point to very different problems.
Take 40 accounts that reached Evaluation in March as an example. If by the end of June 26 are still in Evaluation or have moved to Qualification, while 14 have fallen back to Timing or Discovery, the Ratchet Rate for Evaluation is 26 out of 40, or 65 percent. The March report counted 40 accounts of progress, while what held was 26, and the 14 that slipped tell you where to look, most often at which members of the buying group were never reached.
The metric has limits. Some slipping is honest: an account whose budget was frozen or whose project was cancelled should move back, and a rate that never drops may mean nobody updates the stages. On a list of a few hundred accounts, one month's cohort can be too small to read, so a rate built on 8 accounts should be reported as unreadable rather than as a trend. And the rate covers the acquisition pipeline Torke runs, while slippage in the sales pipeline after Handover belongs to the client's own team and reports.
For a revenue leader, the consequence is a different question in the monthly review. Next to how many accounts moved forward, the report shows how many of last quarter's movers held, and the gap between those two numbers often explains why a program looks productive and still produces few accepted leads.
Any process that reports forward motion without checking whether it held has the same blind spot, from recruiting funnels to partner programs. Pull the accounts that reached your evaluation stage three months ago and check where each one sits today: the share still at that stage or beyond is your Ratchet Rate, and the ones that fell back are the clearest list you will get of what your program is missing.
Each answer stands on its own, so you can forward one to a colleague, and an assistant asked the same question can quote it as it is.
Take every account that entered a stage in one month, and 90 days later count how many are still at that stage or further along. Divide by the number that entered, and repeat for each stage separately.
Some movement back is honest, for example when a budget is frozen or a project is cancelled. A rate that never drops can mean stages are not being updated, so read the reasons behind each slip.
Enough that one account changes the rate by only a few points. With a cohort of under about twenty accounts, report the rate as unreadable or combine several months rather than presenting it as a trend.
Work back from the revenue target and the close date to the accepted leads you need each month, and the last date a new lead can still close this period.
Tell us what your team sells, who buys it and where deals stop moving. You'll get a written reply saying which way of working fits you, or whether a Diagnostic makes sense, and if neither does, the reason.