Ask Olumide how many deals his company will close next month and he’ll give you a confident answer. “About eight. Maybe ten.”
Ask him where that number came from and things get vaguer. The enquiries live in WhatsApp chats across three phones. The quotes live in his email. The follow-ups live in his head, along with school fees, generator diesel and his mother’s birthday. The only real measure of how sales are going is the bank balance at the end of the month, and by then it’s too late to do anything about it.
A sales pipeline fixes that. It’s a shared record of every potential sale and the stage it has reached, with clear rules about what each stage means.
The template below sets out the stages, the exact criteria for moving between them and the fields to record. Then it shows you how to calculate your own conversion rates, forecast from them, and keep the whole thing honest with a thirty-minute weekly review. It works in any CRM, including the free ones, and even in a well-kept spreadsheet. The CRM guide covers choosing the tool.
Why Most Pipelines Turn Into Fiction
Plenty of businesses have a CRM with a pipeline nobody trusts. The reasons are nearly always the same four.
- Stages without definitions. One salesperson moves a deal to “negotiation” after one friendly call, while another waits until the client is haggling over price. The same label means different things, so the pipeline can’t be compared or forecast.
- Deals that never die. Leads that went cold six months ago still sit in the pipeline, inflating its value and hiding the real picture.
- Missing information. Deals with no value, no next step and no date can’t be managed or forecast.
- Nobody looks at it. A pipeline that isn’t reviewed weekly decays into fiction within a month.
Every part of this template exists to prevent one of those.
In The Big Short, Michael Burry made his name by reading the mortgage files everyone else assumed were fine. A pipeline is you reading your own files.
Seven Stages
The template uses seven stages, including two ways a deal can end. Rename them to suit your business, but keep the principle. A deal moves stage when the buyer does or confirms something. How the salesperson feels about it doesn’t count.
| Stage | A deal moves here when… | What you do at this stage |
|---|---|---|
| 1. New enquiry | Someone has contacted you or been referred, and you have a way to reach them | Respond fast, and establish what they need (see the speed to lead guide) |
| 2. Qualified | You’ve confirmed a real need, a budget in your range, a realistic timeframe, and who makes the decision | Understand their situation in depth and decide whether to pursue |
| 3. Proposal sent | You’ve sent a quote or proposal matched to their confirmed need | Follow up on a scheduled date and answer questions |
| 4. Decision stage | The buyer has engaged with the proposal by asking questions, requesting changes, discussing terms or introducing the decision-maker | Address objections and agree final terms |
| 5. Verbal yes | The buyer has said yes, but hasn’t paid or signed | Send the contract or invoice immediately and confirm next steps |
| 6. Won | Payment received or contract signed | Hand over to delivery and onboarding |
| 7. Lost | The buyer declined, went elsewhere, or went silent past your cut-off | Record the reason and decide whether to nurture later |
Qualification, the gate that matters most
Stage 2 is the most important gate in the pipeline, because everything after it costs time. A deal is qualified only when you can answer all four of these.
- Need. do they have a problem you solve, stated in their own words?
- Budget. is what they can spend within the range your offer requires?
- Timing. is there a realistic timeframe, ideally with a reason behind it?
- Decision. do you know who decides, and are you speaking to them or someone who can reach them?
If you can’t answer all four, the deal stays at New Enquiry until you can, or it moves to Lost. Ten qualified deals beat forty hopeful ones every time.
The cut-off rule
Decide how long a deal can sit without a response before it moves to Lost, based on your normal sales cycle. For a quick consumer purchase, that might be two weeks of silence after three follow-ups. For a complex business sale, perhaps six weeks. When the cut-off passes, move the deal to Lost with the reason “No response.” You can reopen it if they come back. This one rule does more for pipeline accuracy than any software feature.
Nine Fields, No More
Every deal needs a small set of fields. Resist adding more, because each extra field makes people less likely to fill in any of them.
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Contact name and company | Who the deal is with |
| Source | Which channel brought the enquiry, so marketing can be judged by revenue, not leads |
| Deal value | An estimate in naira, updated as it becomes clearer |
| Stage | Where it is, by the definitions above |
| Date entered current stage | Shows which deals are stalling |
| Next step and next-step date | The most important field, covering what happens next and when |
| Owner | One named person responsible |
| Expected close date | For forecasting |
| Lost reason | Required when a deal moves to Lost |
The next step and date is the field to enforce. A deal with no next step is a deal nobody’s working. In your weekly review, any open deal without a dated next step gets one before the meeting ends.
The source field connects the pipeline to your marketing. With UTM tagging (the UTM builder helps), it shows you which channels produce revenue as well as enquiries. They’re often different channels.
Your Own Conversion Rates
Once the pipeline has run for a few months with consistent stage definitions, you can calculate how deals really move through it. Ignore industry averages. Your own numbers are the only ones that matter, and they’re easier to work out than most people expect.
For each stage, count how many deals reached it over a period, and how many of those went on to the next stage. Divide the second number by the first. Here’s a worked example with illustrative numbers.
| Stage | Deals that reached it (last quarter) | Moved to next stage | Stage conversion rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| New enquiry | 200 | 80 | 40% |
| Qualified | 80 | 50 | 62.5% |
| Proposal sent | 50 | 30 | 60% |
| Decision stage | 30 | 20 | 66.7% |
| Verbal yes | 20 | 18 | 90% |
In this example, 18 of 200 enquiries became customers, an overall rate of 9%. The stage rates are more useful, because they show exactly where deals die. If only 40% of enquiries qualify, marketing may be attracting the wrong people. If proposals rarely progress, the offer, price or proposal itself needs work. If verbal yeses don’t turn into payments, something is breaking between agreement and invoice.
Sales cycle length
Measure how long deals take too, both the average days from New Enquiry to Won and how long deals spend in each stage. A stage where deals linger much longer than usual is a stage where something is stuck, and a deal that’s been sitting far longer than your average is at risk.
Forecast Instead of Guessing
A pipeline lets you forecast revenue. The simplest reliable method is a weighted pipeline. Multiply each open deal’s value by the chance that deals at its stage eventually close, based on your own history, then add them up.
Using the illustrative rates above, the chance that a deal at a given stage eventually closes is the product of the remaining stage rates. A deal at Verbal Yes closes 90% of the time. A deal at Decision Stage closes 66.7% × 90%, or 60% of the time. At Proposal Sent it’s 60% × 60%, or 36%. So a ₦2,000,000 deal at Decision Stage adds ₦1,200,000 to your weighted forecast.
Three rules keep forecasts honest.
- Use your own historical rates, recalculated each quarter, never borrowed benchmarks or optimistic guesses.
- Only count deals with a realistic close date in the forecast period.
- Clean the pipeline before forecasting. Stale deals inflate every forecast they’re included in.
Thirty Minutes Every Week
The pipeline only works if someone looks at it. Hold a short weekly review, same day and time, with everyone who owns deals.
- New deals (5 minutes). what came in this week, from which sources, and are they qualified?
- Movement (5 minutes). which deals moved forward, which were won, which were lost and why?
- Stalled deals (10 minutes). which deals have been in one stage longer than usual, or have no next step? Agree an action or close them.
- Next steps (5 minutes). confirm every open deal has an owner, a next step and a date.
- The numbers (5 minutes). weighted pipeline value, forecast for the month, and whether you’re on track against your target.
Keep it brisk. The review exists to keep the pipeline accurate and make sure nothing gets forgotten. Save long discussions about individual deals for another time.
What Lost Deals Are Telling You
Lost deals are the most useful data your pipeline produces, as long as the reasons are recorded consistently. Use a short, fixed list instead of free text.
| Lost reason | What it usually points to |
|---|---|
| Price | Positioning, proposal clarity, or targeting the wrong budget range |
| Chose a competitor | Differentiation, proof, or speed of response |
| No response | Weak qualification, or slow and inconsistent follow-up |
| Not a fit | Marketing attracting the wrong audience |
| Timing / postponed | A nurture opportunity, not a true loss |
| Decided not to proceed at all | An unclear case for acting now |
Review lost reasons monthly. If “price” dominates, read the pricing guide before you cut anything, because the real issue is often that buyers don’t understand the value. If “no response” dominates, the follow-up templates and faster replies usually help. To dig deeper, the customer interview script is built for talking to people who didn’t buy.
Six Ways to Break It
- Using the pipeline as a to-do list. It’s a record of sales opportunities, not every task.
- Skipping qualification. Unqualified deals inflate the pipeline and waste proposal time.
- Never closing deals as lost. Hope is not a pipeline stage.
- Changing stage definitions mid-quarter. It breaks every conversion rate you’ve calculated.
- Recording deals after the fact. If deals only enter the CRM once won, you lose all the data about what didn’t work.
- Treating the forecast as a target. The forecast is what the pipeline predicts, and the target is what you need. The gap between them tells you how many new deals you need to find.
Where Sales Meets Marketing
The most valuable thing a pipeline does for marketing is swap “how many leads did we get” for “how much revenue did each channel produce”. Once every deal carries its source, you can work out cost per customer and revenue per channel from real sales. That’s the number the reporting guide puts at the top of every report, and the one the CAC and LTV guide depends on.
Start This Week
You don’t need new software. Set up the seven stages in whatever CRM or spreadsheet you use, write the entry criteria where everyone can see them, add the nine fields, and move every current opportunity into its stage. Close anything that’s been silent past your cut-off. Then book the weekly review.
In a month you’ll have a pipeline you trust. In a quarter, your own conversion rates. By the end of the year, Olumide’s “about eight, maybe ten” becomes a number he can actually plan around.
If enquiries are coming in and sales still feel unpredictable, the free 2-minute diagnostic will show which of your four walls is weakest. Deals that leak between enquiry and payment usually show up under Convert.
Businesses spending ₦1M or more a month on marketing also qualify for a free 30-minute Leak Check, with no card and no obligation.
Olumide is an illustrative character. The template is free to use and adapt. Conversion rates and forecasts in the worked examples use illustrative numbers to show the method, so calculate your own from your pipeline data. This is general business information, not financial advice.
This article covers one part of a bigger system. Our guide to digital marketing in Nigeria shows how the four walls fit together, and the order to build them in.
