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What Is a Sales Pipeline?
TL;DR
A sales pipeline is a visual, stage-based view of every deal a sales team is working, from first contact to closed-won or closed-lost, used to track progress and forecast revenue.
How a pipeline is structured
A pipeline is built from stages — commonly something like New Lead, Contacted, Qualified, Proposal Sent, Negotiation, and Closed Won/Lost. Each deal moves through the stages as a discrete record, often shown as a card on a Kanban-style board.
Stages are usually customizable per team, since a short sales cycle and a long enterprise cycle need different granularity to be useful for tracking.
Pipeline vs. sales funnel
A funnel usually describes the aggregate flow of all prospects, from first touch down to a handful of closed deals — a volume view. A pipeline tracks the same journey per individual deal, with more focus on deal value and current stage than overall volume. In practice the two terms are often used interchangeably.
Why pipeline stages matter for forecasting
Weighting each deal's value by a stage-based close probability (a deal in Negotiation is more likely to close than one in New Lead) gives a rough revenue forecast without waiting for deals to actually close. Stage data also surfaces where deals tend to stall, which is often more useful operationally than the forecast number itself.
