Sales Pipeline Tracker

Keep every possible customer in one place, in stages you define yourself, each with a next step and a date. A deal without a dated next step is a hope, not a deal.

Practice, not research: pipeline stages, the qualification questions and every number on this page are consulting practice and rules of thumb. The templates this one builds on, the customer profile in 6.1 and the voice-of-customer notes in 6.12, carry their own evidence notes.

Use it when:

• You sell your own work (freelance, consulting, a small firm) and leads live in your head, your inbox and your notes.
• You are going freelance and need a working routine for finding customers before the first quote.
• Work comes in waves and you only look for customers when the last job is ending.

Skip it when:

• You have no idea yet who your customer is. Start with 6.1 Who Are Our Customers and 6.2 Segmentation Snapshot.
• You sell through a team with a sales system. Use the system, and use this page only to check that its stages match how your customers buy.

A pipeline is a list of possible deals sorted by how far along they are. Its value is not the list. It is that every row forces a question: what happens next, and when? Most small sellers lose deals not to a competitor but to silence, because nobody picked up the thread.

Three rules shape this page. Define stages by what the customer has done, not by what you have done: "sent a quote" describes you, "asked for a start date" describes them. Qualify early, so that you spend hours on prospects who have a need, money and a decision-maker. And keep the pipeline small enough to review in fifteen minutes a week; one you do not review is a graveyard. Limit: these are working rules, not tested findings, and your market may buy differently. Change the stages when the deals show you they do not fit.

Name four to six stages. For each, write the customer action that moves a deal in. Count the customer's action, not yours.

Strong answer: (illustrative) a stage that depends on something the customer did: "Interested: they replied and agreed to a call." Not: "Interested: I sent them an email."

The one stage where deals stall most often for me:

My customer type for this pipeline (one segment, see 6.2):

Illustrative example: the person, customers and all numbers are made up.

A freelance interaction designer in Gothenburg, six months in, keeps leads in three places and reacts to whoever writes last. She defines four stages by customer action: Lead (replied), Talking (agreed to a call), Quote out, Deciding (asked for a start date). Her qualification check shows that two of her six prospects have no date and no budget, so she stops chasing them. Four deals go into the table, each with a next step and a date; the largest is a quote she has not sent for nine days. She blocks Monday at 9:00 for fifteen minutes and sends that quote the same day. Two weeks later she sees that most deals stall after the quote, and she changes her quote follow-up (see 6.24).