Pipelines & Stages

A pipeline is a sequence of stages an opportunity passes through on its way to closing. Most orgs need at least one (a sales pipeline). Many need several: one per workflow type, one per business line, one per team.

The shape of a pipeline

Each pipeline owns:

• An ordered list of stages.
• A set of opportunities, each sitting in exactly one stage.
• Optional custom fields that apply to every opportunity in that pipeline.

Stages are just labeled buckets. The CRM doesn't enforce a specific order between them. You decide what "Qualified" means and how it differs from "Discovery." But every pipeline ends with a won and a lost terminal stage. Reaching either marks the opportunity as closed for reporting.

Multiple pipelines

You'd want more than one pipeline when:

• You sell two different products with different sales motions.
• You separate inbound and outbound deals.
• You distinguish new business from renewals.
• You have a sales pipeline and a separate fulfillment pipeline that runs after won.

Each opportunity lives in exactly one pipeline at a time. Moving it between pipelines is a single action on the opportunity detail page.

Kanban and list views

The Pipelines page defaults to a Kanban: one column per stage, opportunities as cards. Drag a card right to move the deal forward. Click a card to open it.

A list view is also available: same data, table layout, sortable and filterable. Useful for bulk operations or when you have hundreds of deals in flight.

Weighted forecasting

Each stage can carry a default probability (0-100%). The reporting module multiplies opportunity amount by stage probability to produce weighted pipeline value:

$100k deal in a stage with 40% probability = $40k weighted value

Override the probability per-opportunity if a specific deal is more or less likely than the stage default.

Automations on stage change

When an opportunity moves into a stage you can fire workflow automations: send an email, create a task, notify a channel, update a field, kick off a campaign. See the Automations module for the full builder. Stage-change is one of the most common automation triggers. Use it sparingly to avoid noisy alerts that the team starts ignoring.

Pipelines vs. Submissions

If your motion involves shopping one deal to many counterparties, you usually want a pipeline for the high-level deal status (qualifying, packaged, shopping, closed) and submissions as children of each opportunity to track per-counterparty status. See Submissions.