Every account starts with the same eight stages — New, Contacted, Qualified, Proposal Sent, Negotiation, Won, Lost, Junk. They look like a cosmetic setting. They are not: your stages define what every conversion rate in this CRM means, and which lead movements report conversions to Google Ads and Meta.
Worth knowing before you read on. The eight stages are fixed today — there is no screen for adding, renaming, reordering or deleting them, and the set above is what every account runs on. If your process genuinely needs a different pipeline, write to us and say what it should be; that is currently a change we make for you rather than one you make yourself. The rest of this guide explains what the eight stages mean and how to work them, because getting value out of the pipeline you have matters more than rearranging it.
The two flags that actually matter
Each stage carries an is won and an is lost flag, and almost everything downstream depends on them:
- Your conversion rate on the dashboard counts leads that reached a Won stage.
- Revenue sums deal values on Won leads only.
- Landing page performance ranks pages on their Won rate.
- Leads in Won or Lost stages are excluded from uncontacted-lead alerts — otherwise a lead marked Lost without a logged call would nag your team forever.
Get these flags wrong and every number in the product is quietly wrong with them, with no error to warn you.
Sort order defines "progressed"
Stages have an order, and the leakage funnel defines a lead as having progressed once it moves beyond the first stage. There is no separate "qualified" flag in this CRM, so position is the measure.
This means your first stage should be where leads land, not where work begins. If your first stage is "Contacted", then every new lead appears to have already progressed, and the funnel reports nothing useful.
Why eight, and why you are unlikely to want more
Five to seven working stages, plus Won and Lost, covers almost every business — which is what the seeded set gives you.
The failure mode in any pipeline is a stage nobody moves leads into. Every stage is a decision a salesperson has to make on every lead, and stages that do not change what happens next just add friction — then get ignored, and then your pipeline data stops reflecting reality.
A useful test on the stages you have: for each one, name the action that moves a lead out of it. Any stage you cannot answer that for is a stage your team will quietly stop using, and it is better to agree internally not to use it than to let half the team route leads through it.
If you do ask us to change your pipeline, mention your conversion mapping. A stage mapped to a Google Ads or Meta conversion action stops reporting if that stage goes away, and nothing on screen will tell you — the mapping simply has no stage left to fire on. See mapping conversion actions to pipeline stages.
Junk is not the same as Lost
Both are marked as lost stages, and keeping them separate is worth the extra column. Lost means a real person who did not buy — useful in reporting, worth revisiting later. Junk means a bot, a test submission, or a wrong number.
Mixing them makes your Lost analysis meaningless, because half of it is not real people. It also hides a genuine signal: a rising Junk count usually means a traffic quality problem rather than a sales one. See Traffic Quality.
Working the pipeline you have
Since the stages are fixed, the decisions left to you are about convention rather than configuration, and they are the ones that actually affect your numbers:
- Agree what Qualified means before anyone uses it. Two reps with different definitions produce a conversion rate that measures nothing.
- Use Junk honestly. It is the only thing separating a traffic problem from a sales problem in your reporting.
- Move leads when the thing happens, not at the end of the week. Stage timestamps drive the response-time and leakage reporting, and a batch update on Friday makes all of it fiction. See response time and leakage.
If the pipeline itself is wrong for your business, tell us what it should be rather than working around it — a pipeline nobody follows costs more than the change does.