Pipeline stage

A stage is well defined when two people looking at the same deal put it in the same place without discussing it. That requires the criterion to be an observable event — a meeting held, a specification sent, a proposal opened, terms returned — rather than a state of mind like “interested” or “warm”.

Stages should also be few. Five or six that everyone applies identically forecast better than twelve applied loosely, because the value of the model is in the transition rates between stages, and a rate computed from an inconsistently applied stage is noise with a percentage sign on it.

Stages that describe the seller's confidence

“Qualified”, “interested”, “hot” are unfalsifiable, so deals sit in them indefinitely and the forecast becomes a mood. Every stage should name an event with a date, and a deal that has not moved in twice the median stage duration should be surfaced automatically rather than discovered at quarter end.

A definition sits still. This does not.

The term is a reading taken at a point in a sequence that is already running. These are the sequences, with the place each of them jams.

From an enquiry arriving to somebody answering it

A message from a person who might buy, travelling from the form they filled to somebody who can actually answer what they asked. 6 steps, one inbox per channel, and a person per inbox is the arrangement that fails while looking reasonable.

Somebody is accountable for this number.

A definition is free. Being answerable for the figure it produces is the part that is bought, and this term is a working part of the engagements below.

CRM, websites and omnichannel

One customer, one record. Every metric downstream depends on it.

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Business process audit

Remove before you optimise. Most process debt is subtraction, not addition.

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The reply that arrives tonight

An agent that will not say "I do not know" is not a sales asset. It is a liability with a fast response time.

Lead

A contact who has given permission to be contacted about a specific thing. Not a customer, not a prospect, and not a metric a business should be run on.

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MQL and SQL

Two agreed thresholds on the same contact: one that marketing will vouch for, and one that sales has accepted and is working.

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Conversion rate

The share of a defined population that completed a defined action — meaningless until both the population and the action are stated.

All ninety-six termsWhat this is regulated by in the UAE

Is this one right in your own numbers?

The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.