Working a Pipeline
A pipeline is only as good as the discipline behind it. The configuration takes an hour; the habits are what make the numbers mean anything.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Commercial:
- Boards & Pipeline — the board itself
Architect Panel → Activity:
- Activity Log — who changed a value or a close date
Move cards when reality changes
Not at the end of the month, and not in preparation for a review. A pipeline updated before a meeting reflects what people want the meeting to show; one updated continuously reflects the business.
Close dates are the first thing to rot
The commonest pipeline failure is a mass of opportunities whose close dates have quietly passed. They inflate the pipeline, they distort every weighted total, and everybody learns to ignore the figure.
Make reviewing past-dated opportunities a weekly habit: each one moves forward with a real new date, or moves to lost. There is no third option, and allowing one is how the pipeline stops being trusted.
Every opportunity has an owner
An unowned card is nobody's job. The owner field exists to make that visible, and a pipeline review should start by looking for blanks.
Do not skip stages
A card jumping from the first stage to the last tells you the stages do not reflect how work actually happens, or that somebody is tidying up after the fact. Both are worth knowing — and both are visible in stage history.
Value should be the real number
Optimistic values are as damaging as optimistic probabilities, and harder to spot because they look like data rather than judgement. Where a value is genuinely uncertain, use the realistic figure rather than the best case.
Review the board, not a report
A weekly look at the board itself — where cards are bunched, what has not moved, what has no owner — surfaces things a summary hides. A stage with twenty cards and no movement in a month is the most important thing on the screen, and it does not appear in a total.
Watch for the qualification stage filling up
Early stages that grow without draining usually mean qualification is not happening. Cards enter and nobody wants to be the person who marks them lost. That is a management conversation rather than a configuration change.
Permissions let you narrow the view
Where salespeople should see only their own accounts, use row-level access rather than a board per person. One pipeline with restricted visibility keeps reporting whole while giving each person the view they need.
Worked example
A sales manager starts each Monday on the board: three opportunities with past close dates are either re-dated or lost, one card with no owner is assigned, and a bunching of eleven cards in Proposal prompts a question that turns out to be one person's workload. The weekly forecast is produced afterwards, from a pipeline that is already true.
Recommendations
- Clear past close dates weekly — forward or lost, nothing else.
- Never allow an unowned opportunity.
- Review the board itself, not just a total.
- Use row-level access rather than a board per person.