Name stages after verifiable states
A stage name should be checkable by someone who is not on the deal. "Proposal sent" is checkable. "Qualified" is checkable if you have defined qualification. "In discussion" is not.
The test to apply: could two people look at the same deal and disagree about which stage it is in? If so, the stage boundary is not defined well enough to forecast from.
Write down the entry criteria
Each stage should have a short, explicit condition for entering it — what must be true, and what evidence exists.
This is what makes the pipeline teachable to a new hire and defensible in a review. Without it, stage assignment drifts towards optimism, and the drift is invisible until deals fail to close.
- Six or fewer stages for most processes; more suggests steps, not stages.
- One explicit entry condition per stage, written down.
- Stages a buyer would recognize, not internal activity labels.
- An owner on every deal, at every stage.
Fewer stages than you think
Long pipelines feel rigorous and forecast worse. Each additional stage splits the data thinner and adds a boundary judgement that can go wrong.
If you find yourself wanting ten stages, the extra detail is usually tasks within a stage rather than stages themselves. Model it as the work attached to the deal instead.
When to run more than one pipeline
Genuinely different sales motions deserve separate pipelines — a self-serve renewal and a twelve-month enterprise deal do not share stages meaningfully.
The threshold is whether the stages differ, not whether the customers do. Different segments moving through identical stages belong in one pipeline with a segment field.