Designing pipeline stages that actually forecast
If your stages describe how you feel about a deal rather than what the buyer has done, your forecast is a mood board. Define stages by evidence instead.
A pipeline stage should be a fact about the buyer, not a feeling about the deal. "Interested" is a feeling. "Attended a scoping call and named a decision date" is a fact, and only one of the two can be verified by somebody who was not there.
Write each stage as an observable event that has either happened or has not. If two people on your team could look at the same deal and disagree about the stage, the definition is too soft and your forecast inherits that ambiguity.
Keep the count low. Four or five stages is enough for most small businesses. Every additional stage adds maintenance work and creates a place for deals to sit and rot without anybody noticing.
Then look at deals that have not moved. Age-in-stage is the most useful and least used number in most CRMs: a deal sitting in one stage for six weeks is telling you something that the total pipeline value is hiding.
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