Power to the Pipeline: Deal Stages

Hello everyone! In this week’s Power to the Pipeline, we are going to take a look at Deal Stages and discuss ways you can use them to better organize your sales process. Whether you have 4 or 18 stages in your sales pipeline, it’s important to define them so you can understand what it takes to progress from one stage to the next and ultimately close deals faster.

Deal stages are the essence of your sales pipeline. They serve as the framework that drives the workflow and process your team goes through to win deals. Keeping your deals organized along each step will help you keep deals flowing through your sales pipeline.

The default Deal Stages within PipelineDeals are Qualified Lead, Request for Info, Presentation and Negotiation. You can add or remove Deal Stages to customize PipelineDeals to suit your needs. Our customers have created over 7,500 unique deal stages to manage their sales pipeline. Popular Deal Stages include Proposal, Lead, Prospect, Contract, Closed, On Hold, Quote, Proposal Sent, Contact Signed, and Contract Negotiation.

Creating Deal Stages

Below is an example of a Deal profile with a customized set of Deals Stages. Typically, your Deals will mature from one stage to the next on their way towards the expected close date.

PipelineDeals Administrators can customize Deal Stages and the associated probabilities using the Admin tool.

Filtering Deal Stages

In the Simple filter view, you can filter Deals by Deal Stage by selecting the Deal Stage name within the simple sentence filter at the top of the page.

In the Advanced filter view, you can filter by Deal Stage by clicking Filter below the column name and checking your selections.

Deal Stages are linked with a corresponding probability percentage number. You can track where your deals are by name or even by the probability percentage point. Let’s say you want to know how many of your deals are at the 60% mark or even deals between the 21% – 100%, you can easily track this by adding the Probability column to your Deals Tab and then sort via probability percentage, while in Advanced filters.

Reporting

Deal Stages are powerful and can help you understand the distribution of your deals. In sales, it’s important to keep your pipeline full. As you progress from one stage to the next it’s typical to loose deals along the way. Your sales pipeline should look like a funnel, with more deals in the first stage and fewer deals in the final stage. You can view Deals by Stage within the Dashboard on the Home tab or by clicking Reports, then Dashboard. It’s possible that your sales pipeline may not look like a funnel. This may be due to issues or barriers you and your team are facing when trying to move deals to the next stage. You can use the Dashboard to view the distribution of your deals by stage and identify the stages where deals are bottlenecking.

You can also sort the Stage column within the Deals tab by clicking on the column header name. This will sort your stages from Lost to Won.

Finally, you can quickly see which stage your deals are at by creating a Custom Report within the Reports tab.

We hope this weeks Power to the Pipeline was informative and useful. Deal Stages are a powerful feature you can use to stay organized and up to date. Please tune in next week to learn how you can use Note Categories to track your correspondence and activity.