A deal is a concrete sale to a concrete client: what we sell, for what amount, when we expect to close and with what probability. All deals are gathered into a pipeline that shows how much money sits at each stage and where everything stalls. The agent runs the pipeline work: you look at the picture and give commands.
What a deal is
A deal is always tied to a client — a contact or a company. It has an amount, a close date and a probability. All the correspondence and history gather around the deal: calls, emails, notes, meetings. Thanks to this the question “where are we with this client” is solved by opening one card, not by searching the mail and the notebooks.
Pipelines and stages
A pipeline is the deal’s path from first interest to payment, broken into stages. It is configured as data, not built into the product: you can have one pipeline for new sales and another for renewals, your own stages and their order. Every stage can carry a hint “what needs to be done at this step” and understandable exit conditions — what must be fulfilled for the deal to move on.
On the moves between stages you can put gates — checks that do not let the deal through until an important condition is fulfilled (the amount is not filled in, or there is no next step, for example). The gate does not punish, it reminds: the product refuses the move and names exactly the condition that is not met, in the same words everywhere.
The transition log
Every move of a deal to another stage is recorded: who, when, from which stage to which and for what reason, and how long the deal spent at the previous step. This log is the foundation of all analytics: without it any pipeline numbers would be guesses.
Pipeline analytics
Understandable things are computed from the transition log: how many deals get from stage to stage (conversion), how fast they pass the pipeline, where they linger longest. Pipeline “snapshots” — the state on a given day — are saved separately, so periods can be compared with each other instead of guessing what it was like a month ago.
A separate subject is forecast accuracy: what you expected is compared with what happened. It is an honest way to understand how much your own expectations can be trusted.
Win and loss reasons
A closed deal necessarily gets a reason: why you won or why you lost. The reasons list is configurable, and the reports over it show the main thing — against whom and on what you most often lose. These are the cheapest insights there are: they already lie in your data.
The buying committee
In large sales the decision is made not by one person but by several: someone controls the money, someone influences the choice, someone answers for the technical part. In the deal you can mark these people’s roles — then it is visible at once whether all the needed participants are “for” and whether, say, the finance director without whom the deal will not pass has been missed.
The team and reward split
Several sellers often work on one deal, and then the reward splits in a set proportion. The deal shows who works, who merely watches, and how the revenue is distributed. This settles the eternal disputes “how much is due to me” — the shares are fixed in the deal itself.
The next step and discipline
An open deal must always have a next step — what exactly you do next and when. This simple rule pulls sales out of the main pit of “we sort of left it hanging and forgot”. The product watches the rule: if there is no step, the deal is flagged. Deals that have not moved for a long time are tracked separately: they light up together with the reason — “no activity for two weeks”, for example. This is not punishment but a signal to return to the deal before the client leaves.
Competitors
A deal can name who you are competing against for this client. This is not for the checkbox: the reports show against whom you win more often and against whom you lose — and for which reason. The competitors reference is maintained once and reused in all deals.
Quotas and plan versus fact
A revenue plan can be set per seller and per period, and the product shows how it is being met: how much is closed, how much remains, at what pace you are going and whether you fit the term. The same breakdown works by direction, territory and currency. This is not for the paperwork — the plan shows where to step in before the month ends.
Forecast
The sales forecast is computed from the pipeline: every stage has a probability, and the expected amount adds up from them. The main virtue is transparency: every number shows which deals it came from, and you can drill down to a concrete deal. If a manager thinks otherwise, the forecast can be corrected by hand — and then both the original value and the “scenario” version stay next to the correction: what happens if this deal closes like that. Guesses based on nothing do not exist here.
Approvals
A bigger-than-usual discount or non-standard terms need to be approved by someone. The product runs such approvals with clear deadlines: it is visible who currently holds the question, how long it has been lying there and who needs a reminder. Until the approval passes, the product does not let the violating condition through — and if a manager still permits it as an exception, the reason is recorded too.
Renewals and winning clients back
A sale does not end with payment: the client needs to be kept. The product tracks whose contract or subscription ends soon, so a renewal is not slept through, and separately — former and “sleeping” clients who are worth returning to. Renewal work runs through the same pipeline, with its own stages and deadlines, not as a separate list in a notebook.
Territories, currencies and legal entities
If sellers divide regions or directions between themselves, that is set as data: who answers for what. Deals can run in different currencies — the rates are set manually, so the final amounts converge to one denominator predictably, not “by today’s rate nobody knows where from”. And the legal entity the sale goes from can be named — useful when issuing invoices and contracts.
Automation
Repeating actions can be entrusted to rules: “if the deal moved to this stage — set such and such task”, “if the amount is above this — send it to approval”. The rules have a preview of “what will happen” and a log of performed actions, so the automation never turns into a mystery: it is always visible what it did and why.
Sales methodologies
If you have a habitual order of work (your own questions to the client, your own readiness criteria at each stage), it can be described as a ready set of templates and applied to the pipeline. Then the seller sees not the abstract “we are negotiating” but a concrete checklist: what is already found out and what remains to learn.
A competitive spirit — optionally
Competitive sales scoreboards can be switched on, but this is a disableable setting, and it has protection against gaming: points are counted by events that really happened, not by the number of presses. If such motivation does not suit you, you can simply not switch it on.
All of this is the Deals add-on: without it the client base, leads, money and service work, but there are no pipelines and no sales.