Sales Pipeline Board

Nine stages from New Lead to Ready to Start, each with a running total above it so you can see where the money is sitting, not just how many cards are in a column. Stages you are not working collapse to a rail with their name on its side — which is how nine stages fit on a laptop without becoming a horizontal scroll you never reach the end of.

Name, value, what they want built, who owns it, where the lead came from, and their number — but the two things that matter most are at the bottom. The protocol dots show how much of this stage's checklist is done, and the permit banner tells you whether this job needs a permit and which office governs it. A card that says nothing until you open it is a card you have to open forty times a day.

Type the site address and the jurisdiction boundary is drawn on a map: which city, which county, and whether a building permit is required there. This is the single most expensive thing to get wrong in post-frame sales. Quote without checking and the cost lands after the customer has already agreed a price, and somebody eats it — the customer's goodwill, your margin, or the rep's commission.

You decide what has to happen before a deal may leave a stage, and the checklist travels with the card. It resets if a deal re-enters the stage, and completed steps are written into the transition history — so "did anyone actually call them back" has an answer rather than an argument. Edit the protocols in Settings; they apply to everyone.

The conversation lives on the deal, not in somebody's phone. Call, send a text, or write an email without leaving the card, and every message is filed against that lead where the next person can read it. This is the difference between a CRM that records what happened and one you actually work out of.

The same customer arrives twice — once from the website form, once from a home show — and now two reps are working one job. The board detects them by phone and by email, groups them, and lets you pick which record survives before merging the other into it. You choose the primary; nothing is merged behind your back.

A board is for one deal at a time. When you are routing a hundred leads you want a list: filter by owner, budget, source, state, county, lead age or status, select what you want, and reassign the lot to a rep in one go. Import leads from a spreadsheet and map whoever owned them in your old system onto your real people.

Search across name, building type, amount and date — and when a card matches on something hidden, like an email address, it says so on the card rather than appearing for no visible reason. Filter to barndominiums or pole barns, to a lead strength, to your own deals or the whole company's. Open one stage at a time or several side by side.

Total deals, what the pipeline is worth, how many are hot, how many estimates are out, and how many are ready to start. Not a dashboard you visit — a strip above the board you cannot avoid reading, which is the point.

Weak, Qualified, Strong, Ready to Close, or Dead. A rep's judgement about a deal is worth capturing, and once it is captured you can work the strong ones first and stop the dead ones aging quietly at the bottom of a column.