How to build a sales pipeline

Now that you know what the stages of a pipeline are, it’s time to take all the information you’ve gathered, and start building your own.

Step 1: Take stock of your prospective buyers

In the beginning, before you even have a pipeline, all you’ll have is a list of the people you think would like to buy your product. If there are a lot of them, you will need something to help you manage not only those contacts, but also your interactions with them.

One way to do this is to use a spreadsheet tool such as Google Sheets or Excel. Here is a free template to get you started. Alternatively, a dedicated sales CRM also works.



Using a spreadsheet template like this makes perfect sense if the number of deals you need to manage simultaneously is fewer than 10, or if you’re just starting out and want to organise your pipeline before finding a purpose-built tool to manage it.

A CRM, however, is a more efficient tool if you’ve got more than a few deals, or more than a few salespeople. CRMs allow a team to manage deals collectively, easily move deals from one stage of a pipeline to another, let you link to contact information and allow sales managers to keep an eye on an entire team’s progress toward revenue goals. Need more reasons to look into a CRM? We’ll get deeper into CRMs a bit later.

Step 2: Set up your stages

It’s easy for reps to get overwhelmed by their goals; sometimes a quarterly or annual number may seem too big to achieve. There’s a way to control this sort of overwhelm: by breaking down each deal into the daily activities a rep needs to do in order to close a sale. By managing and focusing on sales activities, your team is likely to be more successful at making their sales goals.

So that’s what your pipeline is measuring and managing: activities.

To set up the stages in your pipeline, think about the activities your team does most and the ones you think have the most impact on your sales. You can use the list of stages above to guide you, or work out the steps in your own sales process.

If you need more ideas check out our guide to activity-based-selling.

Step 3: Refine your stages as you go along

Once you have things going, you may see that some conversation types happen consistently. You need to decide whether these regular occurrences lend themselves to being sales stages in your pipeline.

For example, if you are a real estate agent, you may want to add a “reassure buyer” column, if you face a lot of nervous buyers.

Sales stages, when clearly defined and planned, constitute your pipeline’s fundamental building blocks and set you on your way to predicting your sales revenue with decent accuracy.

Don’t worry about getting it right the first time. It may take numerous attempts to figure out what works for your business. You’ll find that some stages end up being unnecessary, and discover others that you actually need.

Step 4: Keep your pipeline up to date

You’ve built a pipeline. You’ve put your existing contacts and deals into it. Now, how can you make sure it stays updated?

This part can be tricky. Often, when a team hasn’t worked with a pipeline, they may have a hard time adjusting to the habit of entering contacts and deals into the pipeline and moving them through the stages. The key here is to develop a habit of moving deals through the pipeline.

The easiest way to do that is by thinking of the stages of your pipeline like a to-do list. Each stage correlates to an activity your team must complete. Once an activity is completed, your team will move a deal to the next stage. It may take a while for your team to get the hang of it, but after a while, the pipeline will be an invaluable tool for them because it shows them what they’ve done, what they need to do and where in the pipeline each deal is.