Deal stage

A deal stage is a named step in your funnel: Inquiry, Conversation, Proposal, Decision, Payment and After the sale. Each stage says where the deal is from the customer's side. It does not say how busy the seller has been. A deal moves forward only when something happened with the customer that you can check.

Each stage needs an exit rule written in one sentence. For example, a deal leaves Proposal when the customer has received a priced offer and confirmed they read it. In a CRM the stage is a column on the board or a field on the deal card. Required fields on each stage keep the rule honest.

For example, a deal moves to Proposal only after the customer has named the need, the budget and the timeline.

In the weekly pipeline review, the head of sales reads the board stage by stage. The question for each stage is simple: which deals sit here longer than usual, and why? Stages turn one long list of deals into a few short lists. Each short list gets its own decision.

Stages are also what conversion counts. Conversion from Proposal to Decision means something only if every seller moves deals by the same rule. If one seller moves a deal after a call and another after a signed offer, the number mixes two different events. Then you cannot tell whether the offer or the seller is the problem.

Keep the stage apart from the deal and from the funnel. The deal is one customer's purchase. The funnel is the whole path from inquiry to after the sale. The stage is one point on that path. A required field ties them together: the CRM does not let a deal move without the facts the next stage needs.

• Stages named after the seller's actions. "Called" or "Sent a presentation" describes effort, not the customer's position. Name each stage after what the customer has done or agreed to.
• Too many stages. Extra columns split deals into groups nobody can tell apart, and sellers pick one at random. Keep the six stages and put finer detail into fields on the deal card.
• Exit rules that live in someone's head. If the rule is not written, each seller invents their own, and conversion stops meaning anything. Write the rule for each stage in one sentence and pin it to the board.
• Moving deals backward quietly. A deal that drops from Decision back to Conversation often hides a lost answer. When a deal moves back, the seller writes why in a comment the same day.

By Friday, the head of sales writes one exit rule for each of the six stages, one sentence each. Each rule names what the customer did, not what the seller did. On Monday, go through the open deals with the team. Any deal that does not meet the rule of its stage moves back to the stage it really sits in.

CRM rules the team follows and a forecast review you can run every week.