Sales pipeline stages: a simple set-up for a small team

A sales pipeline only helps if its stages mean the same thing to everyone who reads them. “Proposal” should tell you something you can act on. On most small teams it means “I think this one might happen”.

Here’s a set-up that works without a sales operations team, and that you can have running in an afternoon.

Define each stage by what the buyer did

The usual mistake is to name stages after your own activity: called, emailed, sent. These measure effort. Better to move a deal when the buyer has done something you can point to.

Here’s the set a new workspace starts with in Soldlyne, which you can rename to match your business. The starting probabilities are the product’s defaults:

Stage	The deal moves here when…	Starting probability
Identified	You’ve named the company and why it fits	5%
Contacted	You’ve reached a real person, and no answer yet	10%
Conversation	They answered, and the answer wasn’t no	25%
Meeting	A meeting has been held, not just booked	40%
Proposal	They asked for a price, and have one	60%
Won	They said yes	100%
Lost	They said no, or stopped answering for good	0%

Seven names, but only five open stages. If you find yourself wanting a tenth, ask whether it changes what you’d do next. If not, it’s a note, not a stage.

Every open deal has a next step

This is the rule that matters most. A deal with no next step isn’t in your pipeline; it’s in your memory.

A next step has a verb, a person and a date: “Send Léa the revised quote, Thursday”. “Follow up” isn’t one. A good CRM should show you which deals have none, and Soldlyne flags them on the board and on its home page.

Notice what has stopped moving

Deals rarely die with a clear no. They just go quiet. So pick a number of days after which a deal in one stage counts as stuck; Soldlyne uses 14. Then, when one is flagged, either give it a next step or move it to Lost.

Marking a deal lost isn’t a failure. It keeps your numbers honest, and a good reason (too expensive, wrong moment, chose someone else) is the most useful thing a pipeline can teach you.

Use weighted value, carefully

Weighted pipeline value multiplies each open deal by the chance it closes, then adds them up. With made-up deals:

Deal	Amount	Probability	Weighted
Acme: first order	€10,000	60%	€6,000
Northwind: pilot	€20,000	25%	€5,000
Harbor: renewal	€4,000	40%	€1,600
Total	€34,000		€12,600

The €34,000 is what you’d have if everything went right. The €12,600 is a more sober number for planning. It’s only as good as the probabilities, though: after a few months, compare them with your own stage-to-stage conversions and adjust. A default is a starting point, not a fact about your business.

Fifteen minutes a week

Once a week, open the board and go through it from right to left, starting nearest the money:

Proposal. Does each one have a dated next step? Who’s waiting for whom?
Stuck deals. Give them a next step, or close them.
No next step. Same.
What came in. Is anything worth moving up?

Skip the forecast meeting. The point is that the board is true when you close it.

What to measure, once there’s data

After about three months, three numbers tell you most of what you need:

Conversion from stage to stage, to see where deals fall out.
Time in each stage, to see where they wait.
Channel, to see which sources produce deals you win, rather than deals you open.

If you sell several products, look at them separately. A training day and an annual licence don’t move at the same speed, and averaging them hides both.

Common mistakes

Too many stages. If two people disagree on where a deal belongs, merge them.
Stages that depend on you alone. “Quote sent” is true even if the buyer never asked for it.
Never closing anything. A pipeline where nothing is ever lost is a wish list.
Copying a big company’s process. A ten-stage enterprise process on a two-person team mostly measures data entry.

Set it up on paper first, then in whatever tool you use. If you want to try it in Soldlyne, the stages and alerts are described here.