Pipeline management that shows which deal needs you now

Monday morning, weekly sales meeting. The sales manager opens the board and sees 84 open deals with a healthy total. Everyone nods. Then someone asks which deals will actually close this month, and the room goes quiet. Some of those 84 have been there since spring. On others the last email is three weeks old. And a few values were once guessed, because there was no quote yet.

That is what a pipeline often looks like in practice. It is full, but it says little. That is rarely because reps are lazy. It is because the system does not help. A deal that stalled looks exactly like a deal that was discussed yesterday. The value is a number someone typed, not the sum of what you really sell. And why a deal was lost is recorded nowhere, so nobody learns from it.

Good pipeline management means three things. You see per stage how much is there and how much of it is likely to come in. You see which deal has sat still too long, without keeping a list yourself. And afterwards you know how long deals spent in each stage and why you lost. That is what Lumo is built for.

In Lumo every stage gets a win probability and a number of days after which a deal is rotting. The board calculates with those. A deal that sits too long gets a signal on its card and shows up on the owner's Today screen. The value comes from the product lines as soon as you add them. And every move is stored with the time the deal spent in the previous stage. That turns the weekly meeting into a conversation about the deals that need attention, instead of a walk past everything. How to pick the stages themselves is covered in the guide B2B pipeline stages that work.

An example, not a customer story. Say a distributor of technical parts has twelve account managers. They sell to new customers and renew annual contracts with existing ones. Until now everything sat in one list, and nobody knew which deals were really moving.

They create two pipelines. New business gets five stages: Discovery (10 percent, rots after 10 days), Need confirmed (25 percent, 14 days), Proposal (40 percent, 14 days), Negotiation (70 percent, 10 days) and Awaiting sign-off (90 percent, 7 days). Renewals gets three stages with higher probabilities, because the buyer is already a customer.

An account manager has a deal in Proposal with two product lines: 500 units of a part at 12 euro with a 5 percent discount, and a service contract of 250 euro per month for 12 cycles. The deal value becomes 5,700 plus 3,000, so 8,700 euro. Weighted, it counts as 3,480 euro.

After sixteen days in Proposal the deal is marked Stale, two days over. It shows up on the account manager's Today screen, and an automation creates a call for the next morning. The call leads to a new meeting and the deal moves to Negotiation.

In the weekly meeting the sales manager opens Totals per stage and filters on stalled deals. The conversation is about the nine deals that stalled, not all 84. After a quarter, a report on lost reasons shows most lost deals fail on delivery time, not on price. Nobody expected that, and nobody could see it while no reason was recorded.

Deals often start as leads. A lead converts to a deal once, with the person and organization already linked. Mail with the customer lands on the deal through Gmail, and Google Calendar meetings become activities on the most recent open deal. With automations you react to a stage change, a won deal or a stalled one. And if you still need to design your stages, start with the guide set up a sales pipeline.