Pipeline Design
Part of CRM for relationship-led businesses
Modelling long sales cycles without artificial stages
Represent a long or paused sales cycle with a justified stage, waiting reason and review point.
Keep a long-running opportunity in the stage that actual progress supports. Record why it is waiting, who is responsible and when to review it. Elapsed time alone is not a new sales milestone, so a deal can stay in a valid stage for months without passing off a pause as negotiation or creating a “stalled” stage.
Identify the decision being tracked
Use an opportunity for a particular potential purchase with a scope and possible outcome. An exploratory relationship with no current purchase path may belong in an account or enquiry process. Otherwise, one permanently open deal can represent years of unrelated conversations.
The team still needs a clear entry rule for each stage, such as a proposal being delivered. Once that event happens, a wait for a committee, budget or revised specification usually belongs in the deal’s current context. A stage should change when the agreed progress event occurs, not when a chosen number of days passes.
Make the pause reviewable
Suppose a customer has received a proposal and says its committee will consider the budget after a planning meeting. Keep the proposal stage if it remains accurate. Record the customer’s stated dependency, who supplied it, the next agreed contact or justified review point, and the deal owner. Do not record an unconfirmed decision date as a customer promise.
Distinguish a customer dependency from an internal one. An internal legal review may delay the seller’s response, but it does not establish progress in the customer’s decision. A short open-deal review can ask:
- What event supports the current stage?
- What response or decision is awaited, and from whom?
- What will the owner do next, and when will the deal be reviewed?
- Is there still a credible purchase path under the team’s open-deal rule?
If the customer gives no timing, set a defensible internal review point rather than an invented close date.
Decide when to close or resume
A long wait can remain open if there is a credible decision path and someone owns the next review. If the customer declines the proposal or no current purchase decision remains, apply the team’s closure rule while retaining the customer account and useful history.
When interest returns, ask whether the same decision has resumed. A changed requirement may call for a revised scope and an earlier stage on the existing deal. A separate purchase with its own outcome may need another opportunity. Record why the team reopened, revised or created work so an old deal is not replaced merely to make the pipeline look active.
Best Practice Metrics for Long Sales Cycles
- Valid stage duration
- Months, as long as progress is supported by actual events
- Closure trigger
- No credible purchase path or customer decline
Interpret software prompts cautiously
Pipedrive’s rotting feature highlights deals that stay in a stage. Its “rotting” indicator is a prompt to review the deal, not evidence that the customer has lost interest. Pipedrive also warns that moving deals across pipelines can affect Insights reporting.
HubSpot describes pipelines as visualising processes through stages, which signal where a record is in a process. Neither product rule decides whether a particular customer has progressed.
For a paused deal, the useful record is one from which a colleague can explain the current stage, the reason for waiting and the next review decision.
