An inner protocol per stage — an ordered list of steps a person works through inside that stage, rather than a row of horizontal follow-up columns. Steps can be required or optional, carry a hint, and each can hold a free-text note. Completion state lives per deal and resets when the deal moves.
Also called: SOP · standard operating procedure · what to do at this stage · sales checklist · process
The process sits on the stage, not in a training document nobody reopens
Each stage carries an ordered list of steps, marked required or optional, and each step holds a note — "left a voicemail, try after 5". What actually happened on a deal used to depend on who was handling it and how busy he was that week. Now the steps travel with the deal, and "did anyone call them back" has an answer rather than an argument.
"Ready to advance" is a computed answer, not somebody's opinion
Required and optional steps are counted separately, so a stage is ready when every required step is done and the nice-to-haves stop being a blocker. The steps ramp from deep red to green by their position, so a checklist visibly greens up as it is worked and a stalled deal reads red from across the room.
It doesn't ask a man to do the thing he just did
Being in Estimate Sent means the estimate was sent, so that step arrives already ticked. It also cannot be removed — it is the step whose completion is the stage — and it is pinned back to the top if an edit leaves it out. A checklist that tells a rep to send the estimate he sent ninety seconds ago is a checklist he stops reading.
Write your own steps without orphaning last year's records
Defaults ship for every stage and any of them can be rewritten. Labels, hints, order and whether a step is required are all free to change, because live deals and the history hold a durable key rather than the words on screen. Rewording a checklist does not quietly change what the record says happened two years ago.
Every rep can read the process; only an admin rewrites it
Reading the steps is open to anyone working the pipeline, because a checklist that needs a permission to see is a checklist nobody follows. Changing them is an admin action. A new man can answer his own question about what happens next without being able to quietly drop the step he finds annoying.
- 1Universal defaults ship in code keyed by real stage ids; a company can override any stage's steps
- 2Step KEYS are durable identity — live deals and the analytics log store keys, so labels, hints, order and optionality are free to change but keys are not
- 3A stage's entry marker (the step whose completion IS the stage) cannot be removed and is re-pinned to the top if a submitted edit omits it
- 4Progress reports required vs optional separately, so 'ready to advance' means every required step is done
- 5Steps ramp deep red → green by position, so a checklist visibly greens up as it is worked
- 6Writes are admin-only; reading is open to any approved user because the pipeline needs it
The steps a deal is supposed to go through lived in a training document nobody reopened, so what actually happened on a deal depended on who was handling it and how busy they were. The checklists sit on the stage itself. Steps that are already true by virtue of being in the stage — being in Estimate Sent means the estimate was sent — tick themselves on arrival, because telling a rep to do the thing whose completion is the stage reads as software that did not notice what just happened.
- Process living in one person's head
- Checklists that ask for work the system already knows happened
- Edits to a checklist orphaning historical records
See it on your own jobs
Twenty minutes, your numbers, no slide deck. We’ll build one of your real buildings in front of you and send you the estimate link at the end — yours to keep either way.
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