Sales Pipeline Stages: Exit Criteria, Emails

What are sales pipeline stages?

A sales pipeline is a list of open deals, and each deal is assigned to exactly one stage. The stages describe where that particular buyer stands, from first contact through to a signed contract or a recorded loss. Because every deal sits in one stage at a time, the pipeline answers two questions a forecast needs: how many deals are open, and how far along each one is. Sources don't agree on how many stages you need. Teamgate's own overview describes four (Interested, Online Meeting, Pending Decision, Payment). Pipedrive's sales cycle guide lists nine steps from prospecting to generating referrals. A guide from monday.com, cited in Google's AI overview for this search, calls 5 to 7 stages standard. The number matters less than the rule behind each stage. A deal should only move forward when something checkable has happened on the buyer's side. Without that rule, stages turn into labels for whatever the rep did last, and a full pipeline can't tell you which deals are actually alive.

The core stages and the exit criterion for each

The table below sets out a typical B2B outbound pipeline. The exit criterion column matters most. It names the buyer action that lets a deal move to the next stage, and that action can be checked in your inbox, calendar or CRM notes.

Stage	What happens	Exit criterion (buyer action)	What goes wrong here
Prospecting	Find companies and named people who fit your ideal customer profile; verify addresses	A verified contact with a reason to reach out (trigger, role, need)	Unverified addresses bounce on the first send and count against your sending domain
First contact	Cold email, call or LinkedIn message, plus follow-ups	The prospect replies, or picks up and agrees to talk	Follow-ups sent as new threads lose context; sending from an unauthenticated domain fails SPF or DKIM checks
Qualification	Check need, authority, budget, timing and fit	The prospect confirms a problem you solve and who decides	Deals with no confirmed decision-maker get moved forward anyway
Discovery meeting	Structured call on current process, cost of the problem and buying steps	An agreed next step with a date, e.g. a proposal review	The meeting ends without a booked next step
Proposal	Written scope, terms and price sent	The buyer reviews it and raises questions or objections	Proposal sent, then silence, and the deal stays at this stage for months
Negotiation	Terms, legal review, procurement	Verbal yes and contract in signature	New stakeholders appear late and restart qualification
Closed-won / closed-lost	Contract signed, or the deal is ended with a reason	Signature, or a recorded loss reason	Lost deals left open, which inflates the pipeline

What is prospecting in sales?

Prospecting in sales is the first pipeline stage: finding the specific people at specific companies who might buy, and checking that you can reach them. In practice that means building a list from your ideal customer profile, finding the right contact (a named person, not info@), noting a reason to contact them now, and verifying the email address before you send anything. Prospecting is finished when you have a verified contact plus that reason. A list of company names doesn't count. Leaving out the verification step causes problems later, because hard bounces from a first send are recorded against your sending domain. We cover how prospecting differs between sales and marketing teams in our article on what is prospecting in sales and marketing.

How do you create a sales pipeline?

1. 1 Write down the last few deals you won and lost, and the order of events in each. Your stages should mirror how buyers actually bought, not a textbook list.
2. 2 Name each stage after the buyer's position, for example 'Meeting held', rather than the rep's task, such as 'Call scheduled'.
3. 3 Give every stage one exit criterion the buyer must meet. If you can't write one, merge that stage into the one next to it.
4. 4 Set up the stages in your CRM. Pipedrive, HubSpot CRM, Salesforce Sales Cloud and Zoho CRM all work with deals that move through named stages. Check each vendor's own documentation for how stages, probabilities and required fields are configured on your plan.
5. 5 Choose a maximum time a deal may sit in each stage before it's reviewed or closed as lost.
6. 6 Write one follow-up email for each stage, so a stalled deal gets a planned next touch instead of an improvised one.
7. 7 Review the pipeline weekly. Close deals that have missed their exit criterion and record the loss reason.

At the qualification stage, a fixed set of questions gives you the evidence to move a deal on. Our list of qualifying questions by sales stage includes examples for email and calls, plus the answers that should disqualify a deal.

What's the difference between a sales funnel and a sales pipeline?

A sales funnel counts people. It shows how many leads become qualified leads, then opportunities, then customers, and where the volume drops off. It's a marketing and planning view, and it's often modelled on AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). A sales pipeline tracks deals. Each open opportunity has a named buyer, a value, an owner, a stage and a next step. You read a funnel to see conversion between steps across a whole population. You work a pipeline deal by deal to decide what each rep does next. One test: when you can't point to a named person and a next action, you're looking at a funnel, not a pipeline. The two connect at qualification. Funnel leads become pipeline deals only once a buyer has confirmed a need.

What are the 7 stages of sales?

The classic seven-stage sales process describes what the seller does, not what the CRM records:

1. 1 Prospecting: find and verify potential buyers.
2. 2 Preparation: research the company, the person and the trigger before contact.
3. 3 Approach: the first contact by email, phone or in person.
4. 4 Presentation: show how your offer solves the problem you've confirmed.
5. 5 Handling objections: answer concerns about price, timing, risk or fit.
6. 6 Closing: ask for the decision and agree terms.
7. 7 Follow-up: onboarding, check-ins, referrals and renewals after the sale.

Pipeline stages and these seven sales steps overlap but aren't the same thing. Preparation and handling objections are activities that happen inside a stage, so most CRMs don't need them as separate stages.

What are the 5 steps in the CRM process?

The CRM process usually has five steps, covering the whole customer lifecycle: reach (make potential customers aware of you), acquisition (turn them into leads and qualified prospects), conversion (close the sale), retention (keep the customer served and renewing) and loyalty (expansion and referrals). The sales pipeline only covers acquisition and conversion. That's why pipelines end at closed-won, and retention work is tracked in a separate account or customer-success view.

Sales follow-up email template for each stage

A sales follow-up email has one job: move the deal toward its next exit criterion. That means one new fact and one question, in a few sentences. The examples below are matched to the stage where a deal usually stalls. Swap the brackets for real details. A follow-up that only says 'checking in' gives the buyer nothing to reply to. You'll find more complete versions in our collection of sales follow-up email templates.

Stage	Sales follow-up email example	Exit criterion it asks for
First contact, no reply	Hi [Name], one more point on [trigger]: [specific fact about their situation]. Is [problem] something your team is working on this quarter, or not a priority?	A reply, yes or no
Qualification	Thanks for the context on [problem]. Who else would weigh in on a change like this, and is there a budget line for it already?	Decision-maker and budget confirmed
After discovery meeting	Summary of today: [two points they raised]. Next step we agreed: [step] on [date]. Does that still work?	Confirmed date for the next step
Proposal sent, silence	Hi [Name], the proposal from [date] covers [scope]. Is anything in it blocking a decision, such as scope, terms or timing?	An objection or a review date
Negotiation	Legal has the contract draft. Is [named person] the right contact for redlines, and is [date] realistic for signature?	Contract in signature
Breakup / close as lost	I haven't heard back, so I'll close this on my side. If [problem] comes back on your agenda, reply here and we'll pick it up.	A reply, or a recorded loss reason

How to send a follow-up sales email so it stays in the thread

Send every follow-up sales email as a reply to your previous message, not as a new email with 'Re:' typed into the subject line. A real reply carries In-Reply-To and References headers that point to the original message's Message-ID, and that's how mail clients group the messages into one conversation. A fake 'Re:' has no such headers, so the buyer gets a separate, contextless email. Follow-ups also depend on authentication. If your sending domain's SPF, DKIM and DMARC records aren't in place, receiving servers can fail the check on every follow-up you send. Our setup guide on DKIM, DMARC and SPF for cold email senders covers those records. Whether the message ends up in the inbox is still decided by the receiving server.

What is a sales cadence, and where does it sit in the pipeline?

A sales cadence is the planned sequence of touches for a deal at one stage. For each touch it sets the channel (email, call, LinkedIn), the day, and an exit rule that stops the sequence. Most cadences run during first contact, the stage with the most deals and the fewest replies. The exit rule ties the cadence to the pipeline. A reply moves the deal to qualification, an opt-out removes it, and running out of touches closes it as lost. A cadence with no exit rule keeps emailing people who have already answered. Our sales cadence guide has templates and exit rules.

What goes wrong with pipeline stages?

• Stages named after rep activity: 'Proposal sent' only means the rep sent something. Deals pile up there, and the stage total says nothing about buyer intent.
• No time limit per stage: deals that went quiet months ago still count toward the forecast.
• Skipped qualification: a deal goes straight from first reply to proposal, and the proposal reaches someone who can't sign.
• Too many stages: if reps have to guess between two neighbouring stages, the boundary isn't defined and the stages should be merged.
• Lost deals never closed: without a loss reason you can't tell whether the problem was price, timing or fit.
• Prospect data with no legal basis: under the GDPR, personal data in your pipeline needs a lawful basis for processing. German unfair competition law (UWG) restricts advertising email sent without prior consent, including some B2B cases. Check how you operate against these rules rather than assuming a tool covers them.

Where EmailFlow OS fits in the first-contact stage

EmailFlow OS works on the first-contact stage and its follow-ups. It doesn't replace your CRM. You record one video and upload it to EmailFlow OS, connect your own Brevo account and sending domain, and import your prospect list into EmailFlow OS. EmailFlow OS then creates a personalised version of that one recording for each recipient, not just one per company. Each version is sent from your own inbox, through your Brevo account and your sending domain, so the reputation built at this stage stays on a domain you control. EmailFlow OS doesn't send from a shared platform address. When prospects reply, you move the deal forward in your CRM as usual. The home page on personalised AI video email from your own domain explains the mechanism, and our examples of sales outreach messages by stage show how video fits into the copy.

Questions people ask

? How many sales pipeline stages should I have?

Use as many stages as you have distinct buyer-side exit criteria. Teamgate's overview uses four stages, Pipedrive's sales cycle guide lists nine steps, and monday.com, cited in Google's AI overview, calls 5 to 7 standard. If two neighbouring stages share the same exit criterion, merge them.

? What is a weighted sales pipeline?

A weighted pipeline multiplies each deal's value by a close probability assigned to its stage, then adds up the results. An unweighted pipeline is just the raw total of open deal values. Weighting only works if deals leave stages according to buyer-side criteria. If they don't, the probabilities describe rep activity rather than likely revenue.

? How long should a deal stay in one pipeline stage?

Base the limit on your own closed deals, not on a generic figure. Look at how long won deals typically spent in each stage, and review any open deal that has gone well past that. A deal that sits past the limit with no buyer action should get one stage-specific follow-up, and then be closed as lost with a reason.

? Is lead generation a pipeline stage?

Lead generation feeds the pipeline but isn't usually a stage in it. Generated leads are funnel volume. They become pipeline deals at prospecting, once there's a verified, named contact, or at qualification, once a buyer has confirmed a need. Treating every raw lead as a deal inflates the stage counts at the top.