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Sales pipeline

A sales pipeline is every deal a team is working, sorted by stage from the first conversation to the close, so you can see what is likely to close, roughly when, and where deals stall.

Updated October 2026 · 3 min read · GetSales team

Sales pipeline stages

Every team names its stages a little differently. A common version for outbound:

  1. Lead. A person at a company that fits, contacted or about to be.
  2. Engaged. They replied with interest or asked a question.
  3. Meeting booked. A call is on the calendar.
  4. Qualified. After the call you know there is a need, a budget and someone who can say yes.
  5. Proposal. They have your offer and a price.
  6. Closed won or closed lost. The deal leaves the pipeline either way, and the reason goes on record.

A stage works best when it is defined by something the buyer did, such as "accepted a meeting", so two reps put the same deal in the same place. Log every stage change with its date: time in stage and velocity are both built from those dates.

Pipeline and funnel

The two words get mixed up. A pipeline is the seller's list of live deals and what each one is worth. A funnel is the conversion view: of everyone who entered at the top, how many reached each step. You manage a pipeline deal by deal, and you read a funnel to find the step where people drop out.

How to measure a sales pipeline

  • Pipeline value. The total of every open deal.
  • Weighted pipeline. Each deal's value times the chance its stage closes. HubSpot's default deal pipeline gives each stage a probability, from 20% at Appointment scheduled to 90% at Contract sent, and its weighted amount is the stage total times that probability.1
  • Stage conversion. The share of deals that move from each stage to the next.
  • Velocity. Open opportunities times average deal size times win rate, divided by the length of the sales cycle in days: the revenue that moves through the pipeline per day.
  • Coverage. Pipeline value set against the quota it has to fill this period.

In GetSales, the search, the table, Workflows and Unibox share the same people, so each row can show the person's stage, their workflow step and what the AI SDR is doing. The Dashboard follows your people from added to won.

Sources

  1. HubSpot Knowledge Base, Set up and manage object pipelines, last updated 29 September 2026. Read 28 October 2026.

Last updated: October 2026

Sales development representative (SDR)

A sales development representative (SDR) is a salesperson who finds and qualifies new prospects and books first meetings for the account executives who close the deals. An SDR's work ends at the handoff: a qualified meeting on an account executive's calendar.

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Sales qualified lead (SQL)

A sales qualified lead (SQL) is a prospect that someone in sales has checked in a conversation and accepted as a real potential customer, with a need, a person who can buy and a reason to move. In many CRMs it is the step before an opportunity.

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Sales cadence

A sales cadence is the timing and channel plan for reaching one prospect: how many touches, on which channels, how many days apart, and when to stop. The sequence holds the steps and the words, and the cadence decides when each one goes out.

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