Sales pipeline stages: how many your CRM really needs

Quick answer: a healthy sales pipeline has four to five stages, and a company rarely needs more than three or four pipelines (pre-sales, sales, post-sale and nurturing). A stage is a progress milestone; information you want to use in reports becomes a custom field; an action becomes a task. Product and lead source are marked with a field or tag, not with a new pipeline.

I've seen pipelines with dozens of stages. That's impossible to manage.

I work with companies in very different industries and, at the end of the day, the conclusion is always the same: the sales process changes very little, even when the product changes. What changes is how much mess has piled up inside the CRM. In this article I show how I slim down a pipeline without losing any information.

The sales process is more alike than you think

Almost every sale goes through the same milestones:

Lead entry.
Qualification or discovery: understanding if it makes sense and what the person needs.
Proposal.
Closing.
Won or lost.

Education and qualification, for example, are almost always the same thing. "Declined with no reply" isn't a stage, it's a loss reason. When you look through this filter, half of the pipeline's columns disappear.

Stage, field or task?

This is the question that fixes most bloated pipelines. Here's how I split it:

A stage is a progress milestone

Think of each column as an irreversible step. The lead moved forward to the next box, they don't go back. The flow has only one direction: conversion, which can be positive (deal won) or negative (lost).

If you're using stages to filter, your pipeline will get messy.

A field is information you'll want to retrieve

A client came to me with dozens of stages. Among them: "approach 1", "approach 2", "approach 3", "approach 4". We cut down to a few stages and didn't lose any data: the approaches became a field inside the deal.

Another example: warranty. Warranty doesn't need to be a stage, but it can be a custom field, because it's useful information to pull into a report later. And if the report shows a lot of warranty claims, you'll go investigate what's happening in production.

A task is an action

"Send quote" is a task. When the lead enters an analysis stage, the CRM can automatically build a cadence of tasks that need to happen. I don't automate the call itself, but I do automate the call-type task.

How many pipelines to have

What I see working best is having three or four pipelines at most:

Pre-sales (or SDR)
Sales (or closer)
Post-sale
Nurturing (marketing)

In a small company, sometimes one or two are enough.

Why not one pipeline per product or per campaign

A pipeline per product looks organized, but you'll end up with one report per product and one automation per pipeline. With everything in one, it's easier to manage.

A pipeline per campaign is great for whoever runs paid traffic and bad for whoever runs operations. Lead source is marked with a tag or UTM, automatically. You filter when you need to.

So when is a separate pipeline worth it? When the process is different. Not when the product or the source is different.

The more pipelines, the more there is to manage. And a small, overloaded team won't keep the CRM up to date. Without an up-to-date CRM, all the investment in traffic and automation loses its point.

The bonus: a parallel marketing pipeline

One structure I use is running, alongside the sales pipeline, a marketing pipeline with three stages: nurturing, qualified and converted, marked by tag. If the lead lost the sale while still in nurturing, they receive nurturing content. If they made it to qualified and declined, they receive qualified-stage communication. The messaging stays right even after the "no".

Step by step to slim down your pipeline

Map the process before opening the system. In the first meeting with a client, sometimes we don't even look at the CRM: we draw the process and decide what is a stage, what is a field and what is a task.
List all current stages and mark each one as a milestone, information or action.
Turn information into fields. Prefer dropdown fields: they avoid typos, which can break automations.
Turn actions into tasks and make the task cadence automatic for each stage.
Write down the goal of each stage. After the name, it's the first thing I fill in: what does the lead need to move to the next one? What are the loss reasons at this stage?
Consolidate pipelines by process, not by product, campaign or source.
Use tags or UTMs for lead source, ideally automatic.
Only then, automate. The automation layer always comes last: validate the structure first.

Watch out for too many fields

Balance applies to fields too. Too many required fields create a bottleneck: the rep can't move the card, the pipeline gets stuck and stops reflecting reality. Require only what is crucial and possible to collect at that moment, and fill in everything you can automatically.

Frequently asked questions

How many stages should a sales pipeline have?

For pre-sales and sales, I argue for four, five at most. Post-sale can have a few more, because there the pipeline works as a cadence, but never 20.

Should I create a separate pipeline for each product?

In general, no. Use a product field or tag and keep pipelines by process. It's easier to manage, automate and read the reports.

How do I separate paid traffic leads from other lead sources?

With a source tag or field, filled in automatically from UTMs. You don't need a pipeline per campaign.

Will I lose information if I cut pipeline stages?

No, if you turn what used to be a stage into a field or task. The information is still there, and now you can filter it and build reports.

When does it make sense to have more than one pipeline?

When the process is different: pre-sales, sales, post-sale and nurturing are distinct processes.

Keep reading

Want help redesigning your pipeline?

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A lean sales pipeline: few stages, the rest is fields and tasks