A pipeline is useful only when each stage has an exit criterion that can be observed by someone other than the salesperson. Without that, stages describe optimism and the forecast is a mood. With it, a pipeline answers two questions that matter every week: where are deals stalling, and is this month going to land.
Seven stages that work for a developer
| Stage | Exit criterion | Typical duration |
|---|---|---|
| New | Contact attempted and outcome logged | Minutes to hours |
| Qualified | Budget, size and timeline captured | 1–3 days |
| Visit scheduled | Date agreed and confirmed | 2–7 days |
| Visited | Visit happened, feedback recorded | 1 day |
| Proposal | Unit shortlisted, price and payment plan issued in writing | 3–10 days |
| Negotiation | Terms discussed, discount request raised if any | 3–14 days |
| Booked | Booking money received and unit committed | — |
Two rules keep this honest. First, movement is triggered by the event, not by the executive's judgement — a proposal stage that a buyer never received is not a proposal stage. Second, every stage change is timestamped, because stage duration is the diagnostic, not stage count.
The two stages to delete
"Interested". Every lead is interested; that is why they enquired. The stage carries no information and it becomes a parking bay where leads sit until they are quietly marked lost.
"Follow-up". This describes an activity, not a position in a buying process. Leads placed here stop being visible as either active or dead, which is exactly the wrong outcome. Follow-up is something you do at every stage.
What stage-wise conversion tells you
Take one project over a quarter and calculate the conversion from each stage to the next. The pattern points at the problem:
- New to Qualified is low. A contact and speed problem — see lead response time.
- Qualified to Visited is low. Either the project does not match the leads your advertising is buying, or nobody is making the visit easy.
- Visited to Proposal is low. The site visit is underperforming — often specification, progress on site, or the quality of the walkthrough.
- Proposal to Booked is low. Price, payment plan or competitor comparison. This is where discount pressure originates, and where price list discipline is tested.
That diagnosis is not available from a single conversion number, which is why "we converted 4 percent" is a statistic rather than information.
Forecasting without fiction
The workable method is simple: for each stage, apply your own historical conversion rate and average duration, and sum the expected bookings within the month. Two disciplines make it usable. Use rates from your own last two quarters, not confidence numbers assigned by the salesperson. And exclude anything with no logged activity in fourteen days — it is not in the pipeline, whatever the stage says.
Ageing, the report nobody runs
Deals do not usually die; they go quiet. A weekly list of leads whose stage has not changed in more than ten days finds those, and it is a better use of a sales meeting than reviewing the deals everyone is already excited about. Most sales teams discover that a third of their pipeline has been static for a month.
What to do next
Write the exit criterion for each of your current stages in one sentence each. Any stage you cannot write a criterion for is a stage that is not being used consistently — see stage-wise pipeline with timestamps.