What Is Deal Value?
TL;DR
Deal value is the revenue amount attached to a single open opportunity in a CRM. For subscription products it is normally recorded as annual contract value rather than as the first invoice, because a pipeline mixing monthly figures with multi-year totals cannot be summed into anything meaningful.
How should deal value be recorded?
On one basis across the whole pipeline. Annual contract value is the usual choice for subscriptions, and whichever basis is chosen has to apply to every deal, because a total built from three different bases answers no question at all.
Record the expected value rather than the ask. A deal carried at list price while a discount is already being negotiated makes the forecast wrong in the same direction every single time.
What is weighted pipeline value?
Deal value multiplied by the probability attached to the stage the deal sits in, summed across the pipeline. It answers a different question from raw pipeline value: not what is open, but what can reasonably be expected to close.
The weighting is only as good as the stage probabilities behind it, and those are historical win rates from each stage rather than a judgement call. Set once and never recalculated, they make the weighted number precise and wrong.
Frequently asked questions
Track them in a separate field rather than inside the recurring figure. Folding an implementation fee into annual contract value inflates it and breaks any comparison with revenue reporting, which is where the number eventually gets checked.