Sales Pipeline

The deals in progress and the stages they move through.

Also known as: sales pipeline, deal pipeline, pipeline management

A sales pipeline tracks every potential deal through defined stages — qualified, meeting held, pilot, negotiation, closed — with amounts and probabilities attached. It turns “sales feels slow” into located truth: plenty of meetings but no pilots means a demo problem; pilots that never convert mean a value problem. Manage the stages, not the vibes.

stages:  lead → qualified → meeting → pilot → proposal → negotiation → closed/won/lost
each:    count × value × conversion rate → forecast + bottleneck location

Stage definitions must be behavioral (customer did X), never seller-feeling (“good conversation”). Exit criteria per stage keep the pipeline honest: a deal advances on customer action, stalls visibly without it, and dies explicitly rather than lingering as forecast padding.

The classic mistakes:

Happy-ears pipeline. Every conversation marked “likely to close”, every stall “just timing”. Probability by stage history (what % of pilots historically close?), not optimism — then discount new reps’ pipelines further.
Bloated dead deals. Hopeless opportunities lingering for quarters inflate forecasts and hide the real gap. Age limits per stage with automatic demotion; review and kill ritually.
Single-threaded deals. One champion, no backup, surprise veto at signature. Multi-thread from the pilot stage — champion plus economic buyer plus users — or accept ambush risk knowingly.
Activity without conversion focus. Calls made and emails sent while stage-conversion rots. Manage conversion rates between stages first; activity volume second.
CRM theater. Meticulous records nobody reads, forecasts nobody believes. The pipeline review (weekly, honest, kill-friendly) is the process; the tool just holds it.

Review weekly: stage counts, conversion deltas, stuck deals with next actions and owners, and forecast math shown plainly. A clean pipeline tells the truth early — including truths about product and pricing, not just salesmanship.