Glossary
Sales pipeline
Your deals in progress, sorted by stage: contact, conversation, quote, agreed, cash collected. One glance shows what moves and what sleeps.
The pipeline is the snapshot of your deals in progress: every file in a column, every column a stage. Contact received, conversation ongoing, quote sent, agreed, cash collected: five columns are enough.
Well kept, it answers the leader's three questions: what is coming in? where is it stuck? who does what this week? Badly kept, it lies, and you steer by feel. The last column deserves its name: “cash collected”, not “won”. A sale is only finished when the money is in.
To go further
Mini-course
A CRM your team actually fills in
“We have a CRM, but nobody fills it in.” The problem is almost never the tool: it is what the tool is asked to do. Five lessons to a CRM that stays up to date without chasing anyone.
5 lessons · 45 min of reading