One Pipeline Is Not Enough
New business, renewals and hiring move through different steps. Squeezing them into one pipeline hides all three. Here is when to split, how to keep each pipeline honest, and why some should not track money at all.
The pipeline starts as a sales pipeline. Then renewals get added, because they are deals too. Then a few support escalations, because they need tracking. Then a hiring round. Six months later the board has fourteen columns, the forecast mixes new revenue with contracts that already exist, and nobody trusts the number at the top.
A pipeline is a promise about what each column means. One board cannot keep four different promises.
Split by process, not by team
Under Settings → Pipelines, a workspace can run several pipelines — sales, renewals, claims, hiring — each with its own stages, colours and win chances. The board switches between them and shows a weighted forecast for the one you are looking at.
The test for a new pipeline is simple: does this kind of work move through different steps? New business goes from enquiry to proposal to won. A renewal goes from upcoming to in discussion to renewed. A hire goes from applied to interviewed to hired. Different steps, different board.
Make each stage earn its place
Stages can require fields. Moving a card into a stage asks for whatever is still missing — an amount before the proposal stage, a signed date before won — before it moves. It is the cheapest way to keep a forecast honest, because a deal cannot look further along than its data says it is.
The industry templates show what this looks like in practice: the vehicle-appraisal template requires a licence plate before an inspection and a damage amount before a report.
If a stage does not require anything, it is a hope, not a step.
Let the pipelines talk to each other
- Won in sales → created in renewals. An automation flow can create a deal in the renewals pipeline when a sales deal is won.
- Different fields per pipeline. Each pipeline can show the fields that matter to it, so a hiring card is not cluttered with contract terms.
- Saved views per pipeline. "Renewals in the next 90 days" becomes a shared view the team opens every Monday.
The forecast at the top of each board is then a number about one kind of work. That is the only kind of forecast worth reading.
Drag a deal yourself — including the stage that asks for an amount first: the Pipeline scene on our features page.