← Glossary

    CRM & Sales

    Sales Pipeline

    Short definition

    A sales pipeline is the visual map of the stages a deal moves through from first contact to closed sale, used to forecast revenue and spot stuck deals.

    In depth

    A typical service-business pipeline has 4–7 stages: New Lead, Contacted, Estimate Sent, Negotiation, Won, Lost. Each stage has a probability and a dollar value attached. Pipelines surface bottlenecks (deals dying at 'Estimate Sent' suggest a pricing or follow-up problem) and enable forecasting (sum of weighted deal values per stage). Pipelines live inside CRMs and are most powerful when paired with automation that pushes deals forward without human nudging.

    Example

    A landscaping firm sees 60% of deals stall at 'Estimate Sent'. They add an automated 3-touch follow-up sequence and close-rate from that stage doubles.

    Related terms

    CRM (Customer Relationship Management)AttributionMarketing AutomationKPI (Key Performance Indicator)

    Related glossary

    Keep going from here.

    Glossary

    CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

    CRM is software that stores every lead, customer, and interaction in one place so a service business can follow up faster, sell more, and stop losing deals to a forgotten inbox.

    Read →

    Glossary

    Attribution

    Attribution is the method of assigning credit to the marketing channels and touchpoints that produced a lead or sale.

    Read →

    Glossary

    Marketing Automation

    Marketing automation is software that triggers messages, tasks, and workflows based on lead behavior — replacing manual follow-up with rules-based or AI-driven sequences.

    Read →

    Glossary

    KPI (Key Performance Indicator)

    A KPI is a quantifiable measure tied directly to a business goal — the metric you watch to know whether the business is moving in the right direction.

    Read →