Deal Stage

What is a deal stage?

A deal stage is a defined step in a sales pipeline that describes how far a deal has progressed in the buying process, for example Qualified, Proposal sent or Negotiation. A deal occupies one stage at a time and advances through them in a set order until it closes as won or lost. A well-designed stage carries three pieces of information: a checkable exit criterion, ideally something the buyer does rather than something the seller does; a win probability, used in weighted pipeline and forecast math; and a typical duration against which the deal's speed is measured. Tracking how deals move between stages is what produces conversion rates, cycle length and bottlenecks.

Example: stages for a solar installer

After a quarter, test the design against reality. If 70% of deals that reached the offer stage were actually won, a 55% probability is too low and should go up. If deals sit in financing for 30 days on average, the written duration ignores how long banks take; adjust it, or split financing into its own stage.

In Naffes CRM

Naffes CRM admins configure stages from Deals by opening the pipeline switcher and choosing Manage pipelines. Each stage has an Arabic and an English name, a win probability and an optional typical-days budget, and stages are reordered with up and down controls. The stages then drive several behaviors:

• Stuck detection. An open deal that overstays its stage's typical days is flagged Watch when it reaches the budget, Stuck at twice the budget and Frozen at three times; admins can change the multiples. A stage with no typical days is never flagged.
• Moves driven by conversations. A rep's reply moves the deal to contacted, a bot qualification moves it to qualified, and a booked meeting moves it to a consultation stage if the pipeline has one. Moves only go forward and only apply to open deals.
• Quotes move deals. Sending a deal's first quote advances it to the pipeline's quote or proposal stage automatically; a deal that is already further along stays where it is.
• Forecast category from stage position (Pro plan). The further along the stage, the stronger the category: stages in the first quarter of the pipeline feed Pipeline, the middle stages feed Best Case, and stages in its last quarter feed Commit.

Stage colors cannot currently be edited in the stage editor. See deal management for the rest, and sales forecast for how stages feed revenue projections.

Signs your stages need a redesign

• Half of all deals pile up in one stage: its exit criterion is probably vague or depends on a third party.
• Deals regularly skip a stage: it is either unnecessary or nobody records it.
• Two stages share the same win probability: one of them is redundant.
• A stage is named after an internal activity such as 'Follow-up': it tells you nothing about where the buyer stands.

Questions