Glossary term
Kanban Board
A kanban board shows work as cards in columns that stand for its stages, so you can see at a glance where deals or tasks are piling up. In sales, moving a card to the next column means moving the deal to its next stage.
What is a kanban board?
A kanban board is a visual tool for managing work, made of columns that represent the stages of a workflow and cards that represent the individual pieces of work, which move across the columns as they progress. Kanban is a Japanese word for a card or signboard. The idea comes from the Toyota Production System, where cards described which parts were used, in what quantity, where and when; Toyota rolled the system out to all its plants in 1963. In a CRM, the columns are pipeline stages and the cards are deals, so the team sees the load in every stage and moves a deal by dragging its card. The same board format is used for tasks, with columns such as To do, In progress and Done.
Example: reading the deal board in a morning stand-up
A marketing agency runs a five-column board (illustrative numbers): Qualified has 11 cards, Discovery meeting 7, Preparing proposal 18, Proposal sent 6 and Negotiation 3. In the morning stand-up the problem is visible without a report: 18 deals are waiting for a proposal while the team can produce only 6 proposals a week, so the last deal in that column waits about three weeks. The fix is not more leads. It is emptying the proposal column first, with proposal templates, a dedicated person, or a cap on work in progress for that column.
That cap, the WIP (work-in-progress) limit, is a core kanban principle: a ceiling on how many cards a column may hold, which forces the team to finish what it started before pulling in new work.
In Naffes CRM
Kanban is one of six ways to view the deals list in Naffes CRM, alongside Table, Forecast, Timeline, Gantt and Calendar:
- The Kanban view is available when a single pipeline is selected, and that pipeline's stages become the board's columns.
- Dragging a deal card to another column moves the deal to that stage.
- To focus the board, switch between Mine, Team and All, or apply a quick filter such as Stuck or Closing this week.
- Internal tasks can also be shown as a list or a kanban board, with each task in a status of to do, in progress, review or done.
- The interface is built right-to-left for Arabic, with mirrored direction icons, and drag-and-drop announcements for screen readers are spoken in the user's language.
On phones, deal tables switch to cards that fit the narrow screen. Contacts and companies have no kanban view; they switch between table and card layouts. See sales pipeline, deal stage and deal management.
Board or table: when to use which
- Kanban for managing flow: stand-ups, moving deals forward and spotting bottlenecks.
- Table for sorting, bulk edits and comparing numbers.
- Forecast view for reading values by close month or owner.
- Calendar or Gantt for keeping an eye on expected close dates.
Questions
Questions 2
Does moving a card actually change the deal's stage?
Yes, in Naffes dragging a card to another column moves the deal to that stage. That is why reps should move a card when the stage's exit criterion is met, not simply because they spoke to the customer.
Can one board show several pipelines?
No. The columns are built from the stages of one pipeline, so the Kanban view needs a specific pipeline selected. To see deals from every pipeline together, use the Table view.