How many pipeline stages should I have?

Four or five. Every stage past that is a distinction you will stop maintaining within a month, which makes the whole board less trustworthy than fewer, honest stages.

Should I track probability percentages per stage?

Only if someone above you requires a weighted forecast. For your own selling it is a number you invent and then believe, which is worse than no number.

Is a spreadsheet good enough for a sales pipeline?

Up to roughly twenty or thirty open deals, yes. Past that the problem is not storage but triage — you need something that surfaces what is due instead of making you scan everything.

Guide

A sales pipeline template that fits on one screen

Most pipelines start life as a spreadsheet, and for the first couple of months that is genuinely the right tool. Here is the structure worth copying, and the specific ways it breaks once the deal count climbs.

The five stages that cover almost every deal

Lead — someone who could plausibly buy, but you have not established that they have a problem worth solving. Most of what lands in your inbox belongs here.

Working — you have talked to a human and confirmed there is a real problem. This is where the actual selling happens, and where deals sit longest.

Proposal — numbers are in front of them and someone has to decide. From here the job is removing reasons to stall.

Won and Lost — closed either way. Lost is not a graveyard: a logged reason to reconnect is the cheapest pipeline you will ever build.

The columns that earn their place

Company, deal value, stage, next follow-up date, and the last time you touched it. That is the whole useful set.

Everything else — lead score, probability percentage, weighted forecast — is a number you will maintain and never act on. If a column has never once changed what you did that day, delete it.

The one genuinely load-bearing field is the follow-up date. A pipeline without one is a list of things you feel vaguely guilty about.

Where the spreadsheet starts costing you

It is not the row count. It is that a spreadsheet cannot tell you what needs attention today. You have to read all of it to find the three that matter, so eventually you stop reading it.

It also is not in your hand. The moment between calls in a parking lot is when a follow-up actually gets logged, and that is precisely when a spreadsheet is least usable.

And nothing goes stale on its own. A deal you have not touched in three weeks looks exactly like one you called yesterday.

Common questions

How many pipeline stages should I have?: Four or five. Every stage past that is a distinction you will stop maintaining within a month, which makes the whole board less trustworthy than fewer, honest stages.
Should I track probability percentages per stage?: Only if someone above you requires a weighted forecast. For your own selling it is a number you invent and then believe, which is worse than no number.
Is a spreadsheet good enough for a sales pipeline?: Up to roughly twenty or thirty open deals, yes. Past that the problem is not storage but triage — you need something that surfaces what is due instead of making you scan everything.