Deal Pipeline

What it is

A pipeline is the ordered set of stages an opportunity passes through, from created to closed won or closed lost. Each stage is meant to represent a distinct state of the buying process, and the sequence is meant to be predictive: a deal in stage four should close more often than one in stage two.

Stages describe the buyer, not the seller

The most common defect is stages named after what the seller did — "demo given", "proposal sent". Sending a proposal is not evidence that anything changed for the buyer. Stages that track seller activity produce a pipeline where deals advance because work was done rather than because the purchase became more likely, and the conversion rates then mean nothing.

The corrective is exit criteria: a written, checkable condition for leaving each stage, expressed as something the buyer did or confirmed. Not "we sent pricing" but "the economic buyer has confirmed budget exists for this fiscal year".

How many pipelines

One pipeline per genuinely different buying process — new business and renewals usually qualify, as do direct and partner-sourced deals when the steps really differ. Beyond that, resist. Every extra pipeline splits your conversion data into smaller samples and makes cross-pipeline reporting harder than it needs to be.

What it is not

A pipeline is not a lifecycle stage. Lifecycle describes the relationship with a person or company over time; a pipeline describes one revenue event in progress. Conflating them is a frequent cause of reporting that cannot be reconciled.