Short answers about deal stages, Kanban boards, activity history, stale opportunities, pipeline analytics, and weighted forecasts for service businesses.
A sales pipeline is a structured view of open opportunities from first enquiry to won, lost, scheduled, delivered, or paid. For service businesses, it helps teams see what needs follow-up, which quotes are stuck, and how much future work may close.
Use simple event-based stages such as new enquiry, qualified, quoted, won, scheduled or delivered, paid, and lost. Stages should reflect something that actually happened, not vague feelings such as warm or interested.
Kanban is useful for daily work because teams can see deals by stage and move them as events happen. Lists are useful for sorting, filtering, exports, and detailed review. Most teams benefit from a board for action and list-style analytics for inspection.
A stale deal is an open opportunity with no meaningful recent activity. Review stale deals weekly, send a specific re-engagement message, set a next step where possible, and mark dead deals lost with a reason so the forecast stays honest.
Pipeline forecasting uses open deal value, probability, expected close date, and stage to estimate likely future revenue. A weighted forecast multiplies deal value by probability, but the forecast only stays useful if the team keeps deal data current.
Review active deals at least weekly. Check deals with no next step, no recent activity, missing close dates, stale probability, large values, and anything expected to close soon. The review should produce actions, not only a report.