Best practices
Optimize Your Sales Pipeline Stages
An efficient sales pipeline has clearly defined and balanced stages. Too many stages lead to complexity, confusion, and admin overhead. Too few stages can obscure insights and lead to poor sales performance.
Recommended Approach:
Balance Clarity and Simplicity: Aim for 4-7 pipeline stages. This number strikes the ideal balance, providing sufficient granularity to track progress without overwhelming the sales team.
Reflect the Buyer Journey: Design your stages to mirror your typical customer buying journey. Each stage should represent a distinct customer action or milestone (e.g., Qualified, Demo Scheduled, Proposal Sent, Negotiation, Contract Sent, Closed).
Clear Exit Criteria: Define explicit conditions for moving deals from one stage to the next. Example: To move from "Demo Scheduled" to "Proposal Sent," ensure you've confirmed clear buyer interest, identified decision-makers, and discussed budget.
Concrete Example of Pipeline Stages:
Qualified: Prospect has confirmed interest and meets basic qualification criteria.
Demo Scheduled: Prospect committed to a product demo or initial presentation.
Proposal Sent: You have sent pricing/proposal documents to the prospect.
Negotiation: Prospect is actively negotiating terms and addressing specific questions.
Contract Sent: Contract issued to the prospect for signature.
Closed Won/Lost: Deal outcome finalized.
Pipeline Reviews and Clean-Up
Pipeline reviews: Hold weekly pipeline review meetings to resolve stalled deals and identify high-priority ones. Some even use two daily stand-ups to review deals. Schedule this in your calendar, prioritize it and be rigorous.
Age tracking: Set up alerts or highlights for deals that have been stagnant for X days in a stage and clean them up.
Close lost or inactive deals: Avoid clutter in your pipeline by marking lost deals as 'Closed Lost' with a clear reason, rather than leaving them open. Don’t use inactive or lost deals as reminders or placeholders by keeping them in your pipeline indefinitely. Close the deal and schedule a task later to re-add it to your pipeline.
Keep Deals Up to Date
Ensure each deal has:
An assigned owner (unless your team is small)
The next step
Ensure each Closed Lost deal has a Lost Reason. You will pat yourself on the back later, when, for example, you are fundraising and investors ask questions about your lost deals.
Use CRM Tasks
Keeping track of the next steps is critical in sales. Using CRM tasks instead of a personal task manager ensures:
Tasks stay linked to the right object – Whether it’s a deal, contact, or company, all tasks are automatically connected, so you or someone new will never lose context.
Visibility – Everyone in the team can see what needs to happen next.
Less stress, fewer missed follow-ups – You won’t remember in six months that you need to follow up with a prospect, but your CRM will.
Use an AI notetaker: When you use an AI notetaker in your calls, tasks are created automatically based on the discussed action points
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