How to build a simple sales pipeline

A sales pipeline is the list of deals you are working on, arranged by how close each one is to a decision. Build it by naming the stages a buyer actually passes through, putting every open deal into one of them, and recording three things per deal: the amount, the expected close date and the next action. That is enough to run a small sales operation.

The mistake that kills pipelines is designing stages around what your team does — “proposal sent”, “followed up” — instead of what the buyer has decided. A stage should represent progress in their head, not activity in yours.

The steps

1. List the stages a typical deal goes through, from first contact to signed. Four to six is plenty.
2. Define each stage by what has become true, not by what you did: “budget confirmed” rather than “sent pricing”.
3. Add every open deal to the pipeline, including the ones that only exist in your inbox.
4. For each deal record the amount, the expected close date and the single next action with a date.
5. Agree what moves a deal forward, and what marks it lost. A deal with no next action is not open — it is stalled.
6. Review the pipeline weekly: move what progressed, close what died, and be honest about the dates.

Stages that work

• New — the deal exists, nothing is qualified yet.
• Qualified — you know the need, the budget and who decides. Deals that cannot reach this stage should be closed, not nurtured indefinitely.
• Proposal — a concrete offer is with the buyer.
• Negotiation — the buyer wants it and is settling terms.
• Won / Lost — record why. The reasons are the most useful data your pipeline will ever produce.

Track lost reasons from the first week. After thirty deals they will tell you more about your pricing and positioning than any survey.

What to track, and what to skip

Every field you add is a field someone has to fill in. Start with four — company, amount, stage, next action — and add more only when you have a question you cannot answer without them. Elaborate CRMs go unused for exactly this reason: they ask for data before anyone needs it.

• Worth tracking: amount, stage, next action with a date, source of the lead.
• Worth tracking later: probability, competitor, decision maker, contract length.
• Usually not worth it for a small team: lead scores, multi-level forecast categories, custom fields nobody reads.

Spreadsheet or CRM?

A spreadsheet is fine for one person and a handful of deals. It stops working when two people update it at once, when you want a history of what changed, or when the next action needs to become a reminder rather than a hope. That is the point to move to a pipeline tool — and to move the data as it is, not to redesign the process on the way.

Doing it in Ettex

Ettex CRM keeps contacts, a visual deal pipeline and the activity behind each deal in one place, with your documents, invoices and email in the same suite — so a deal can link to the proposal itself rather than to a copy of it.