Every account starts with 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.
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.
How many stages
Fewer than you think. Five to seven working stages, plus Won and Lost, covers almost every business.
The failure mode 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 good test: for each stage, name the action that moves a lead out of it. If you cannot, delete it.
Before renaming or deleting a stage, check your conversion mapping. If a stage is mapped to a Google Ads or Meta conversion action, removing it silently stops those conversions being reported — and nothing on screen will tell you. 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.
Changing stages on a live pipeline
Renaming a stage is safe — leads stay where they are and history is preserved.
Reordering changes what "progressed" means, so your leakage numbers will shift. That is correct behaviour, but do not read a jump the following morning as a change in team performance.
Deleting a stage that still has leads in it is the one to be careful with. Move them first, deliberately, rather than finding out where they landed afterwards.