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.