Setting up a sales pipeline that holds up

Stages are the customer's steps, not yours

“Quote sent” says something about your work. “They've seen the price and asked for a change” says something about the chance of it happening. That distinction sounds like pedantry, and it decides whether your pipeline predicts anything or only records.

The practical test: for each stage, can you write down what must have happened before a deal is allowed to leave it? That condition is called an exit criterion, and it should be objective. Not “it feels positive” but “they named a budget”, “they named a date”, or “the person who decides was in the meeting”.

Without those criteria everyone moves cards on instinct, and then “we've got six deals in negotiation” means something different to each of your colleagues.

How many stages

Five to seven. Fewer and you see no movement: everything sits in the same column for months. More and the boundaries blur — with eleven stages nobody can say why something went from six to seven, and moving cards becomes arbitrary.

A layout that works for a lot of small service businesses looks like this:

1. Lead. There's a name and a reason to call, but no conversation yet. Out as soon as you've actually spoken to someone.
2. Contact. You've spoken and you know what they want. Out as soon as you know enough to put a price on it, and not before.
3. Quote. The price is with them. Out as soon as they respond, whichever way.
4. Negotiation. Price, terms or timing are being discussed. Out on a yes or a no.
5. Won. Work secured.
6. Lost. Didn't happen, with the reason recorded.

If your work includes a step that always happens and genuinely decides the outcome — a site visit, a trial order, a technical survey — it belongs in the list. If it happens for one customer in ten, it doesn't.

One deal is one decision

A common mistake is creating a deal per product or per invoice. Then you have three cards that always move together, and every number you read off is three times too high.

The workable rule: one deal per decision the customer makes. If they decide on the whole package at once, that's one deal. If they decide on a pilot now and the rollout later, that's two, because the second can fall over while the first goes ahead.

What to record against each deal

Keep it short, because every extra field is a reason not to update it. Four things will do.

• The value. A reasonable estimate is enough; what matters is the total, not the rounding.
• An expected date. Not because it's accurate, but because a date that's moved three times is itself the signal.
• The owner. One name. A deal owned by two people is owned by nobody.
• The next step, with a date. The one field you can't skip.

Lose them with a reason

A deal marked lost without a reason is information thrown away. With a reason attached — too expensive, we replied too late, went to a competitor, project postponed, no budget — a pattern appears after a few months. And a pattern is something you can act on.

Keep that list of reasons short and fixed. Five options everyone uses the same way tell you more than a free-text box holding ten different phrasings of the same thing.

And mark lost deals lost. Deals that sit in negotiation forever because nobody wants to close them off make the whole pipeline useless: the number of open opportunities becomes a figure nobody believes.

Maintenance: fifteen minutes a week

A pipeline goes stale quickly. One fixed slot a week is enough, with three questions: where has nothing happened for more than two weeks, which expected dates have passed, and which deal has no next step? That's the whole of the upkeep.

That habit isn't unique to sales, incidentally. When the ONS scores how well UK firms are managed, what it measures is largely this: whether a business sets targets, tracks a few key numbers, and reviews them regularly. Firms in the top quarter of that score were associated with 43% higher turnover per worker than those in the bottom quarter. Association isn't cause, and a weekly review won't produce that on its own — but it's a reminder that the review, not the software, is the part that does the work.

What you shouldn't do is draw conclusions the pipeline can't carry. A pipeline of twenty deals doesn't forecast your quarter; it shows you where something has stopped. A sales forecast is a separate exercise — gov.uk lists it as part of a business plan, next to the marketing and financial forecasts — and it needs more than the current state of your cards. Keep the two apart, and your pipeline stays useful for the thing it is good at.

The pipeline in Nermio comes with these six stages already in place — Lead, Contact, Quote, Negotiation, Won and Lost — and you drag a deal to move it. A lost deal asks for a reason, so that those reasons add up to a pattern later.