How to manage your client sales pipeline

The Client Pipeline is a board showing every client you work with and how far along the sales journey they have travelled. Each column is a phase, each card is a client, and moving a card from one column to the next records that progress.

Kept up to date, it answers the questions you need answered every week: who is waiting on a proposal, who is mid-negotiation, and who has gone quiet.

Opening the pipeline

Select Clients in the left-hand menu.
Choose Pipeline from the options that appear.

The board opens with a column for each phase. The number beside a phase name tells you how many clients are sitting in it, so you can see where your attention is needed at a glance. Use the scroll bar along the bottom to reach the phases furthest to the right.

Each card shows the client's logo, their name, their client reference number and their current profile status. The ⋮ menu on a card is how you move that client between phases, along with any other actions available for them. Cards cannot be dragged.

The phases explained

Your pipeline runs left to right, from a first conversation through to a working relationship. The phases fall into three broader stages:

Draft — the client is still a prospect:

Potential — a client you have identified but not yet approached. Every newly created client starts here.
Contacted — you have made contact.
Qualified — you have established that they are a genuine prospect for your services.
Proposal Sent — you have put terms or rates in front of them.
Negotiation — you are agreeing the details.
Onboarding — they have said yes, and you are setting them up.

Active — the client is working with you:

Live — fully onboarded and actively working with you.

Inactive — the relationship has stopped, for now or for good:

Dormant — no longer active, but not lost.
Lost — the opportunity has not gone ahead.

Adding a client to the pipeline

Select Create Client at the top of the board and complete the client's details.

New clients always appear in the Potential column, whatever stage your conversation has actually reached. If you are adding someone you have already spoken to, move them along to the correct phase once they have been created.

Moving a client through the pipeline

Move a client on as soon as a step has happened, so the board reflects reality rather than intentions.

Find the client's card in its current column.
Select the ⋮ menu on the card and choose the phase you want to move them to.

A few examples of when to move a client:

You have had your first conversation → move them from Potential to Contacted
They have asked for rates → move them to Proposal Sent
They have agreed to work with you → move them to Onboarding

You can keep moving a client forward through each phase as the relationship develops, all the way to Onboarding.

Tip: Update the board at the end of each day rather than trying to remember a week's worth of conversations. It takes a minute and keeps the numbers at the top of each column meaningful.

Taking a client from Onboarding to Live

There is one checkpoint in the journey. When a client reaches Onboarding, their profile must be activated before they can go any further — a half-completed client record cannot become a working client.

Open the client's profile and complete any outstanding details.
Activate the profile. The badge on their card will update to reflect the new status.
Move the client to Live.

Once in Live, a client stays there for as long as they are engaged with you. There is nothing further to do on the board while the relationship is running normally.

When a client goes quiet

If a client becomes inactive, they are moved to Dormant automatically. You do not need to do anything, and nothing is lost — their record and history remain intact, ready if they come back to you.

Marking a client as Lost

If an opportunity is not going ahead, move the client to Lost. This can be done from any phase.

It can feel like admitting defeat, but an accurate pipeline is far more useful than an optimistic one. A client sitting in Negotiation for eight months makes your figures meaningless.

Re-engaging a lost client

Circumstances change, and a client who said no last year may say yes this year.

Find the client in the Lost column.
Move them back to Potential.
Reactivate their profile.

They then work through the pipeline as normal, with their previous history still attached.

Finding a particular client

On a busy board, scrolling is not the fastest way to find someone. Select Advance Filter above the board to narrow the view down to the clients you are interested in.

Seeing how the phases connect

If you are ever unsure which moves are possible from a given phase, select View Workflows above the board. A diagram opens showing the whole journey, from Start through each phase in turn, with the phases grouped into Draft, Active and Inactive.

The arrows show you exactly what can happen at each point:

Each phase leads on to the next one in the sequence
Every phase in the Draft stage can lead directly to Lost
Live can lead to Dormant or Lost
Dormant and Lost connect back to the start of the journey, which is how a client is re-engaged

Select the X in the corner to close the diagram.

If something looks wrong

Your pipeline is maintained by your own team, so most corrections are a case of moving a card back or updating the client's profile.

If something cannot be put right from the board — a client stuck in a phase, a profile that will not activate, or a client appearing in Dormant when they are actively working with you — please contact our Support Team with the client's name and reference number, and we will look into it.