Deals
A deal is a revenue opportunity: something you are trying to close with a company. Every deal belongs to one Pipeline and sits in one of its Stages, and moving it between stages is what drives your boards, forecasts and reports. A deal belongs to at most one company and links to any number of contacts.
Why deals are their own records
Some CRMs run a sales pipeline as a status field on the company. Zero keeps deals separate, and we'd recommend you do too:
A company can have more than one deal. Renewals, expansions and a second product line each get their own record instead of overwriting the last one.
Real deal records leave a clean history, so conversion rates, sales cycles and revenue patterns still mean something once you scale — including when a board or an investor asks.
A deal carries its own owners, contacts, tasks and next steps, which is what makes a handoff between teams survivable.
Follow-ups, next-step suggestions and pipeline insights work on structured deals; there is nothing for them to reason about in a status field.
Pipelines and stages
A workspace can have several pipelines, one per sales motion or customer journey, each with its own stages. A deal is in exactly one.
Stages are grouped under four statuses: Lead, In progress, Won and Lost. Closed deals end in a Won or Lost stage.
One stage is where new deals start. Deals move by dragging on a Board view or by editing the Stage property anywhere it appears.
A stage can require certain properties. Zero prompts for the missing ones when a deal moves in, and a deal that still lacks them shows an Incomplete badge.
With Weighted deal values on, each stage carries a Weight — how likely a deal there is to close — which turns Deal value into a Weighted deal value for forecasting.
Time in current stage and Stage since are tracked for you, so quiet deals are easy to find.
Admins configure all of this in Settings → Workspace → Pipelines; see Pipelines for the full reference and advice on designing stages.
A deal can also carry quotes built from your product catalog, which work out the contract value and can set the deal's value — see Products & Quotes.
Keeping your pipeline healthy
A pipeline is only as useful as it is honest. A few habits that keep it that way:
Review it weekly. Put the review in the calendar and be rigorous about resolving stalled deals and naming the priorities.
Watch deal age. Filter or highlight on Time in current stage to surface what has been sitting too long — Add list highlight in a view's Options menu colors the matching rows.
Close what is dead. Mark lost deals Closed Lost with a reason rather than leaving them open, and don't keep inactive deals around as reminders. Close the deal and schedule a task to revisit it.
Keep open deals complete. An owner under Owners and a Next steps task on every one; a lost reason on every closed-lost one. You will want those reasons later.
Track next steps as CRM tasks, not in a personal task manager, so they stay attached to the deal and visible to everyone. With a notetaker connected, tasks are created from the action items discussed in your calls.
Adding deals
Manually — Add deal at the top of any deal list (and of Deals). On a Board view the button moves into the columns: + at the top of a stage column, or Add row at its foot, starts a deal in that stage. The confirm button is Create deal.
Command menu — Add deal (Cmd + K, then D).
From a related record — Add deal in the ⋯ menu of a company header, or Add to deal on a contact, which starts the deal with that company and contact filled in.
Import — CSV or a migration from another CRM. See Data Import.
Agents — an agent action can create or update deals. See Agents.
Chat, MCP and the API —
add_dealfor Chat and MCP clients,POST /api/dealsfor REST. See MCP.
Standard properties
Name, Pipeline, Stage (with Stage → Type, Previous stage, Previous stages, Stage since, Time in current stage)
Deal value, Confidence (probability in percent), and the derived Weighted deal value
Close date, Start date, End date, Time to close
Company — a deal belongs to one company
Contacts — the people involved
Owners, Lists, Tasks, Next steps
Outcome reasoning — Zero's explanation of why a deal was won or lost
Created at, Created by, Updated at, Updated by, External ID, Archived
Anything beyond this is a custom property.
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