Understand the pipeline

The pipeline is a board of stages that your contacts move along, from first enquiry to won or lost. Each card is one contact. It lives on the Pipeline tab of Contacts, beside the people it shows.

Before you start

• Nothing. Every account starts with five stages: New leads, Contacted, Qualified, Customers (marked won) and Lost (marked lost). You can rename, recolour, reorder, add and delete them.

Steps

1. Open Contacts › Pipeline.
2. Read the line at the top, for example 42 contacts across 5 stages · $6,300 in play. The amount in play leaves out the Lost stage.
3. Read a column header: the stage name, then the number of leads and their total value, for example 8 leads · $1,450.
4. Read a card. It shows: - the name and email address; - up to three tags, then +2 for any more; - how long they have been in this stage (today, 3d), in amber once they have sat there longer than the stage allows and in red at twice that; - open tasks, for example 1 task; - their value, with ~ in front when it is an estimate.
5. Hover over a card to show two buttons: the envelope opens your own email program to write to them, and + adds a task.
6. Press a card to open the contact's record.
7. Narrow the board with Search name or email or the All tags button. Press Clear to show everyone again.
8. Press the arrow beside a stage name to collapse the column to a thin strip. Press the strip to open it again. Collapsed columns are remembered on this browser.

What happens next

• New people land in the first open stage: the first stage that is neither won nor lost. Leads from your forms and contacts you add by hand start there.
• Paying moves people to the won stage. When a contact's order is paid, they move to the stage marked won (for example Customers) by themselves.
• In each column, the most promising people (highest lead score) are at the top, then those who have waited longest.
• Archived contacts are not on the board.

For agencies

Each client has its own pipeline. Open the client first (Sub-accounts › Open).

Troubleshooting

"Contacts appear here as they come in from your funnels." There are no active contacts yet. Press Add contact to add one by hand, or import a list.

A contact I know about isn't on the board. They are archived, or the search box or tag filter is hiding them. Press Clear, or restore them from Contacts › ··· › Restore archived contacts.

Someone moved to Customers without anybody touching them. Their order was paid. Paid contacts move to the stage marked won.

A card shows amber or red days, but the stage I added never does. Only the stages every account starts with have a "stale after" time: 2 days for New leads, 5 for Contacted and 10 for Qualified. The won and lost stages, and stages you add yourself, never go stale.

A column says "Nothing here". No contact is in that stage, or none that match your search or tag filter.

Related

• Set up your pipeline stages
• Move contacts between stages
• Deal values and totals
• Start a workflow when someone moves stage