Stages should describe things that have actually happened, not how optimistic you feel. New, contacted, qualified, proposal sent, won, lost is a workable set for most service businesses because each transition is verifiable. Stages named after feelings, such as warm or promising, produce a pipeline that cannot be trusted for forecasting and that hides deals which have quietly died.
The pipeline's real value is operational rather than predictive. Looking at it should immediately show which opportunities have not been touched in a week, which have sat in one stage far longer than normal, and where the volume drops off sharply between two stages. That drop is where your process is losing money, and it is usually invisible without the stage view.
Clerkzo builds this in at the level a small firm needs. Every captured enquiry lands in a leads inbox and moves through New, Contacted, Qualified and then Won or Lost, so following up is a matter of working a board rather than searching an email folder for the thing you meant to reply to on Tuesday.
Related guides
Related terms
Browse all 104 terms- Sales qualified lead (SQL)A sales qualified lead (SQL) is a prospect that a salesperson has personally vetted and accepted as a genuine opportunity worth pursuing. Unlike a marketing qualified lead, it reflects a human judgement that the need, budget, timeline and authority are real.
- Conversion funnelA conversion funnel is the sequence of steps a visitor moves through on the way to becoming a customer, from first arriving on your site to completing the action you want. It narrows at each stage, and the shape of that narrowing shows where you are losing people.
- Marketing attributionMarketing attribution is the practice of assigning credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoints that contributed to it. It exists to answer a deceptively hard question: which of the things you are paying for actually produced the customer.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total profit a business expects to earn from a single customer over the entire relationship, not just the first purchase. It sets the ceiling on what you can sensibly spend to acquire one.