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Setting up Your Sales Pipelines

Set up multiple sales pipelines and customize their stages to monitor how leads move through your sales process.

Updated over a week ago

Productive's Pipeline and Deal stage feature will help manage your sales process and improve forecasting accuracy.

Sales Pipelines Highlights

  • Multiple Sales Pipelines
    Create and manage separate pipelines for each product line, customer segment, or sales team. Each pipeline can be customized with different stages to reflect your specific sales process.

  • Deal Stage Control
    Define clear and concise names for your stages, then choose to enable features like time tracking, expense tracking, and booking creation directly within each deal stage.

  • Probability Forecasting (Available on Ultimate plan only)
    Set a default probability of closing the deal for each stage, allowing you to forecast sales performance with greater accuracy.

  • Visual Customization
    Personalize your pipelines with custom colors and icons for each stage, making your sales process visually appealing and easy to understand. Rename the default stages to match your specific sales terminology.

  • Simplified Deal Management
    Easily assign deals to the appropriate pipeline and stage during creation or editing. Utilize the new "Won" and "Lost" shortcuts for quick deal updates.

Plan Availability

The number of pipelines you can create depends on your Productive plan:

  • Essential: 1 Pipeline

  • Professional: 3 Pipelines

  • Ultimate: 5 Pipelines (including the Probability per Stage feature)

Creating Sales Pipelines

  1. Access the pipeline settings by hovering over your profile picture or initials in the top right corner, selecting Settings, and navigating to Sales settings.

  2. Under Sales settings, you'll find the options for pipelines and their stages.

    Note that all your existing pipeline stages will be migrated to the new Sales pipeline.

  3. Select "Add Pipeline" to create a new sales pipeline for your specific needs.

  4. To add a new stage to your sales pipeline, click "+ Add stage" and customize the stage details.

  5. After customizing your stage, save the changes and select "Create stage" for it to be added to the pipeline of your choice.

Customizing Stages Within Pipelines

Each pipeline can have multiple stages that represent the different steps in your sales process.

When creating a stage, define a clear and concise stage name that describes the deal's progress at that point.


You can also configure additional options for each stage:

  • Track Time: Enable time tracking for deals in this stage to monitor the time spent working on them.

  • Track Expenses: Enable expense tracking to record any associated costs with deals in this stage.

  • Create Bookings: Allow creating bookings in Resourcing for deals within this stage.

  • Set a default probability of closing the deal for each stage. This helps you forecast your sales performance.

    By default, the "Lost" and "Won" stages have probabilities set to 0% and 100%, respectively. You can customize the default probability for other stages based on your historical data and experience.

  • Decide on the default stage status. It can be Open, Won or Lost. This means that you can trigger winning or losing a deal once you move them to a stage in a "Won" or "Lost" status.

Visualizing Your Sales Process

Give each stage a unique color and add an icon to distinguish the pipelines for a more visually appealing and informative pipeline organization.

The icon you select for the pipeline will be visible in your CRM > Deals, alongside the stage colors you choose.

Tip: Rearranging the order of stages (dragging and dropping) will affect the order of the stages you see in your CRM > Deals!

Managing Pipelines and Stages

When setting up your pipeline stages, you can rename the default stages to better reflect your specific sales process terminology by clicking directly on the stage name.

To edit a stage after saving, select the three-dot menu to the right and click on Edit.

Note that the stage status cannot be changed after saving, as changing it might affect all existing Open, Won and Lost deals.

If you need to reassign a stage to a new pipeline, select the three-dot menu, and click "Move".

From there, select the desired pipeline and select "Move stage to pipeline" to confirm the move.

To delete a pipeline stage, select the three-dot menu and click on "Delete".

This will open a prompt guiding you to switch the existing deals to a new stage.

Using Pipelines in Deals

When creating or editing a deal, you'll see a dropdown menu just below the deal name helping you assign it to the appropriate pipeline and stage.

For quicker deal updates, use the new "Won" and "Lost" shortcuts to instantly move deals to the corresponding statuses.

Alternatively, you can drag and drop the deal into the pipeline of your choice. Similarly, if you select multiple deals, you can change their stages at once by clicking the Stage button in the blue tray.

Table Layout

If you prefer a table layout over the pipeline (Board) one, switch between the two by accessing the layout menu and choosing Table from the dropdown.



The table layout also allows you to customize which data you want to see by selecting the pipeline (a single pipeline or all your pipelines), adding different fields, using filters, and then saving the preferred view for ease of access.

Tip: Sort and filter your data by clicking on the field header (e.g. Stage).


Sales Pipelines and Reports

Want to see how your sales deals are doing? Head to the Reports section and build a custom report on your deals.

This report will show you how much revenue you expect to bring in (projected revenue) from deals at various stages in your sales funnel (pipeline).

By using filters for the pipeline and looking at deal stages (added as fields to the report), you can get a clear picture of your sales progress.

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