A pipeline that does not lie to you
28 Aug 2026 PipelinesManagement
Open any team's pipeline and you will find stages like: "Contacted", "Proposal sent", "Following up". All three describe what the seller did. None of them tells you anything about the odds of closing.
The rule
Every stage must be named after an event the buyer performed, and one you can verify.
Sending a proposal is your action. The buyer asking for a change to specific terms, introducing you to the signer, or asking about delivery time, those are theirs, and each is real evidence of movement.
| Stage | The exit event (buyer's action) |
|---|---|
| Discovery | Agreed to a meeting at a set time |
| Qualification | Disclosed budget or the authorised party |
| Proposal | Explicitly asked for a written offer |
| Negotiation | Responded with a specific change or objection |
| Approval | Entered the request into their internal cycle |
A two-question test
Take any stage you have and ask:
- Would two different reps judge identically that a deal has reached it? If not, the stage is an opinion, not a state.
- What prevents a deal from sitting there forever? If there is no answer, you have a bin, not a stage.
"Following up" in particular
It is the most common bin in a pipeline. Anything that does not obviously belong somewhere goes there, until it swells to half the board. Delete it. A deal is either in a stage with an awaited event and a dated task, or it is lost, and calling it lost is kinder than suspending it for a year.
What you gain
Once stages are events rather than opinions, the pipeline total becomes a number you can trust. And the weekly review becomes one question per deal: what event are we waiting for, and by when?, instead of "any news?".