What is a sales pipeline?
A sales pipeline is a structured view of every open sales opportunity, organized by stage from first enquiry to signed agreement, showing what is likely to close, when and for how much.
Stages should describe things the buyer has done, not things the salesperson hopes. For a service business, a typical set might be enquiry, qualified, meeting held, proposal sent, verbal yes and signed. Each stage should have a clear entry rule, such as "proposal sent" meaning a priced proposal has actually been delivered. Fewer, clearly defined stages produce more honest reports than many vague ones.
A healthy pipeline answers practical questions. Do we have enough work coming to keep the team busy next quarter? Which proposals have gone quiet? Where do deals tend to stall? Looking at conversion rates between stages and average time in each stage often reveals the real bottleneck, such as proposals taking two weeks to produce.
Pipelines go wrong when nobody closes out dead deals, when values are guesses, or when stages mean different things to different people. A weekly review of stale opportunities and a rule that every open deal needs a next step and date keep the picture usable. The pipeline is only as reliable as the CRM data behind it.
Example
For example, a commercial printing company sets six pipeline stages in Pipedrive and requires a quote amount before a deal can move to proposal sent. The weekly sales meeting starts with any deal that has had no activity for 14 days. The owner notices most stalls happen after quotes and adds a structured follow-up sequence.