Sales Pipeline
A sales pipeline is the set of a company's open sales opportunities, organized by the stage each one has reached between the first qualified conversation and a closed deal.
Also called: pipeline, deal pipeline
Why it matters
The pipeline shows a sales team what it is likely to close and what it needs to create. Leaders use it to forecast revenue, spot deals that have stalled and decide where reps should spend time. If the pipeline is too thin for the target, the team knows early that it needs more prospecting or marketing.
Each company defines its own stages, such as discovery, demo, proposal, negotiation and closed won or closed lost, ideally with clear exit criteria for each. A pipeline is only as useful as the data in it, so teams review it regularly, remove deals that have no real next step and track how long deals sit in each stage.
Example
A sales team has 30 open deals: 12 in discovery, 9 in demo, 6 in proposal and 3 in negotiation. In the weekly review, the manager notices that four proposal-stage deals have had no activity for a month. Two are moved back to discovery and one is closed lost, which gives a more realistic picture for the forecast.
Turn the definition into a working system.
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