Guide to Sales Pipeline Stages 

Nikita R.

Media-savvy content creator, with a curiosity for all Salesforce experiences.

Updated: Jan 13th, 2025

According to Harvard Business Review, businesses that have a formal sales process with pipeline stages, enjoy up to 28% in revenue growth. For this reason, businesses should strive to create detailed pipeline stages when they want to focus on boosting sales.

If this is your time to create a sales pipeline and want to know more about this process, join us in the article below. We explore sales pipelines, their different stages, and how to optimize them when working with Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Let’s get started!

What is a Sales Pipeline? 

It is a visual representation of the stages a lead travels through when purchasing products or services from a business. For example, “lead generation” could be the first stage in a sales pipeline. Depending on the requirements of the business, like using a CRM platform, a Salesforce pipeline stage could be “post-sale,“ which describes how to deliver products and services to a client.

Benefits of a Sales Pipeline

So, why use a sales pipeline? One of the benefits is that it helps sales teams PRIORITIZE potential customers. Since the typical sales pipeline stages can identify where a lead is in the customer journey, businesses can plan on focusing efforts on the ones that really want to purchase products and services.

Here are some of the other benefits of creating a sales pipeline for your business:

#1 Access to Valuable Analytics

By understanding your lead and customer data better in Salesforce, teams work more efficiently. The sales pipeline with Salesforce tools can show when potential customers have stopped interacting with your business. With this information, sales teams can create new strategies to stop leads from dropping off at this stage in the sales pipeline.

By supporting leads successfully through the sales pipeline, a business will see an improvement in its conversion rates.

#2 Insight into Sales Team Performance

A sales pipeline can also support managers with tracking the overall performance of a sales team. Since each stage of the sales pipeline, requires different tasks to be completed, managers can track the daily activities of their sales agents. If there are any areas that need improvement, the manager can speak to the sales agent and create new strategies to successfully guide prospects through the sales pipeline.

#3 Better Revenue Predictions

We can’t tell the future for sure, but a sales pipeline helps us calculate how much revenue we could make if everything goes as planned and leads end up purchasing our products and services.

The benefits of a sales pipeline are unbeatable. So, how do we start creating one?

Sales Pipeline Stages Explained 

Every business is unique and has its own requirements, CRM software, key performance indicators, and goals. For this reason, each sales pipeline will be custom-made to fit the needs of a business. However, there are COMMON stages of a sales pipeline. Let’s take a look at some of the key steps that you could add to your sales pipeline if you need them.

Prospecting

This is often the first stage in a sales pipeline. During this phase, sales representatives will seek leads and potential customers who are interested in the products and services they need to sell. One of the ways sales representatives find leads is by gathering information for Salesforce through:

Cold Calling or Emailing People in a Specific Industry.

Networking at Conferences or through Social Media.

Engaging in marketing activities, such as optimizing the search engine on a website or being active on social media.

Lead Qualification

In this stage, sales teams evaluate a lead’s behavior and determine whether a company’s products and services are a good match for their needs.

Demo/Meeting 

This stage in a sales pipeline is important if your leads need to understand how your product works or what your service does. Demonstrations and meetings are often booked with potential customers when products and services are expensive. Providing a thorough demonstration to prospects with a low score for converting into customers would be time-consuming and costly for companies.

Therefore, this stage will follow the lead qualification stage, so that efforts can be focused on individuals who are really interested in the products and services your business has to offer.

Proposal

When a potential customer makes it to this stage of the sales pipeline, the sale representative will present a TAILORED solution. These presentations can be in the form of a product demonstration but proposals are usually a common approach.

Negotiation or Commitment

During this stage of the sales pipeline, the sales agent and potential customer are already discussing the potential of closing the deal. These talks will include the terms of the sale, how much the products and services cost, as well as any conditions of the deal.

Closing the Deal

This stage of the sales pipeline is exciting as the sale is finalized between the lead and the sales agent. The lead is then converted to a customer in Salesforce, and the company secures a contract to drive business growth.

Retaining the Client

Sales agents focus their efforts on keeping customers happy in this part of the sales pipeline. A good place to start is with a great onboarding program. This initiative introduces your client to your community and teaches them where to find customer support and troubleshooting documents, as well as how to access a knowledge base.

These efforts make a lasting professional impact in addition to delivering satisfying products and services to customers. Remember to check out Titan, if you need client onboarding forms for Salesforce. We can help you create them using absolutely no code.

Building a Sales Pipeline Process

When you want to manage leads in an organized manner and boost sales, you need to BUILD a sales pipeline process. With the stages of a pipeline clearly defined, sales teams can do their jobs well:

Stay organized and follow the standard practices in your sales process.

Track the progress of leads and sales deals.

Speed up the rate that leads travel through each stage of the sales pipeline.

Now, you can take a look at our advice below. It shows how to optimize tasks to build a reliable sales pipeline. Feel free to take what you need for your specific team goals.

1. Find Your Target Buyers

Our first tip is to get to know who your ideal lead is. You can do this by studying your current customers in Salesforce and take note of which industry they belong to, the company they work at, and the amount of money they can spend on your products and services. There are other details you can study in Salesforce, which include the challenges a customer faces and their demographics.

This type of Salesforce data can be analyzed to prospect new clients and score leads in the future.

2. Assign Sales Tasks to Your Team

A quick win is to get your sales representatives to create a lead qualification framework. This structure must ensure only high-quality leads make it into the stages in a sales pipeline. Many sales teams like to use the BANT method to create a lead qualification process. It’s an acronym for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline.

Another popular method for this exercise is CHAMP, which stands for Challenges, Authority, Money, and Prioritization. Once complete, sales representatives can start creating a lead-scoring task. This activity is used to rank leads on the following points:

The size of the company that the lead works for.

The amount of times the lead engaged with the sales team.

Does the product or service meet the lead’s needs?

A solid lead qualifying and scoring process will help sales teams to focus on prospects who have a high chance of converting into actual customers.

Do you need to add lead data from Salesforce to a document and email it to your sales team? Why not Try Titan? Our platform gives your sales team the power of automated document generation directly from Salesforce using no code!

3. Choose the Length of Your Sales Cycle

This tip comes in handy when you are optimizing your sales pipeline. This will involve shortening or lengthening your sales cycle, which informs leads and your employees of your business expectations for deal closure. It might be difficult to choose a sales cycle length, so we suggest learning about the environment in which you sell products and services.

For example, companies that operate in B2B (business-to-business) industries have long sales cycles. This is because they offer complex products and services to business partners. In these types of business arrangements, to close a deal requires many key decision makers and a lot of money.

On the other hand, companies that provide products and services directly to consumers have short sales cycles. This is because consumers are in more control of their personal purchases and can make quick decisions without added investment from other parties.

4. Determine the Size of Your Sales Pipeline

This tip is essential as it serves many purposes. Teams need to understand the size of their sales pipeline to:

Set Revenue Goals they can Achieve

Manage Time and Resources Well

Line Up Opportunities to Meet Sales Targets

The size of a pipeline will include the value and volume of your deals at different stages in the sales process. We suggest you calculate the size of your pipeline by identifying your revenue targets. Once you have this figure, you can reverse-engineer your calculations and figure out how many deals you need in your sales pipeline.

The formula you need is [Revenue Goal = Deals Closed x Average Deal Size]. So, if your Revenue Goal figure is $1,000,000 and your Average Deal Size is $10,000, you need to close 100 deals.

5. Filter Out Inactive Deals From Your Sales Pipeline

You want to filter out INACTIVE deals for many reasons. When you have a sales pipeline that is overloaded with idle deals, you can yield incorrect data for sales forecasting and waste your team’s resources. You don’t want to run the risk of overestimating your potential earnings, as this could lead to poor decision-making and unrealistic goals for your team.

So, instead of missing sales targets, get rid of those inactive deals.

Sales Pipeline Vs. Sales Funnel

We would like to take a moment and discuss the differences between a sales pipeline and funnel. It’s a common request from readers since these two terms are used interchangeably in business. However, they are different visualization methods to analyze sales processes.

A sales pipeline provides a step-by-step process that shows a sales team where each lead is in the customer journey. Sales representatives use the pipeline to remember the steps and actions they need to take to close deals with leads. To find out more about the stages of a pipeline, scroll up this article.

A sales funnel is a visual representation of a lead’s conversion journey to becoming a customer. In a sales funnel, teams can see how many leads are in a specific stage of your sales pipeline. The sales funnel looks different to the stages of a pipeline as it is shaped like a funnel.

The top of a sales funnel is wide and has many leads. The bottom of the sales funnel is narrow with only a few leads. This is due to many of them dropping of the radar.

TITAN CLM Assisting Your Sales Processes 

As we learned, a sales pipeline brings structure to the way you manage leads by giving you the support to guide prospects through a sales process. However, there are many stages in a sales pipeline that need to be tracked, which is not an easy task. To speed up your administration tasks in the sales pipeline, like automatically adding lead data to Salesforce or sending contracts to prospects, you might want to consider using software to help get the job done.

We recommend that Titan CLM manage all your sales deals in Salesforce. With our powerful no-code app, your sales representatives can redline, edit, and comment on any contract while tracking every step inside Salesforce. Our CLM software is a game-changer when it comes to collaborating with colleagues, leads, and customers!

For example, sales representatives can approve or reject changes in contracts or add participants at any stage of the customer journey to make the best deals for their organization. Here are a few more features to support sales teams in their revenue-generating tasks:

Titan takes the pressure off sales teams by ensuring contracts are signed quickly and securely.

Sales representatives can manage, review, and track every change made to an agreement directly in Salesforce for a 360-degree view of the contract lifecycle.

Sales teams get complete visibility over every piece of content that is inserted or deleted in real time with the power of our deep Salesforce integration.

Multiple parties and departments can collaborate on a document in real time so deals can be finalized in minutes instead of days and weeks.

Negotiations are simple and can take place via Word using intuitive redlining and commenting tools.

You can add collaborators at any stage of the contract lifecycle.

Titan CLM is more competitively priced than leading alternatives.

Titan CLM digitizes and automates the contract lifecycle in Salesforce.

Our contract automation process is secure and cuts at least 40 hours of manual work a month while closing deals 78% faster.

This is just a short feature list of what you can achieve with Titan CLM. For more information on how we can help eradicate administrative tasks in your sales pipeline, contact us through one of our social media channels below.

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Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us.