Sales Pipeline Templates
Eight pipelines built for how specific businesses actually sell. Every stage has a testable exit criterion, a default probability, and a healthy time-in-stage, so a stalled deal is obvious without asking anyone.
B2B SaaS Sales Pipeline Template
Built around the two things that actually decide a SaaS deal: whether the product got used, and whether procurement will let it through.
Recruitment Agency Sales Pipeline Template
The job-order pipeline, from vacancy to cleared rebate. Built for the fact that recruitment revenue is not safe on placement day.
Marketing Agency Sales Pipeline Template
A retainer and project pipeline that puts scope lock before the pitch, so you stop giving away strategy for free.
Real Estate Sales Pipeline Template
From first enquiry to completed sale, with financing status treated as a stage gate rather than an afterthought.
Consulting Sales Pipeline Template
A pipeline for scoped engagements, where the real risks are writing proposals with no budget line and winning work you cannot staff.
B2B Wholesale and Distribution Pipeline Template
From buyer meeting to the reorder that proves it is an account, with credit checks and MOQs treated as real stages.
Insurance and Financial Services Pipeline Template
A compliance-aware pipeline where underwriting is its own stage and the renewal date is created the day the policy goes live.
Manufacturing and Industrial Sales Pipeline Template
The RFQ pipeline: feasibility, quotation, technical approval, then a purchase order. Long cycles, engineering gates, real tooling costs.
How this works
Why a generic pipeline template fails
Most templates you find online are the same six stages with the labels swapped: lead, contact made, proposal, negotiation, won. That works for nobody, because the stages of a pipeline are supposed to encode the specific risks of your business. A recruitment desk loses revenue at the offer stage and inside the rebate window. A manufacturer loses it when a quote goes stale. A SaaS team loses it in a security review nobody planned for. If your stages do not name those moments, your CRM cannot warn you about them.
What makes an exit criterion good
An exit criterion has to be something a manager can verify without asking the rep how the deal feels. "Prospect is interested" is not a criterion. "Prospect has confirmed the budget owner by name and a target go-live date" is, because it is either recorded on the deal or it is not. Every stage in these templates is written that way on purpose, and the fastest way to improve any existing pipeline is to rewrite its stage definitions in that form.
How to use the probabilities
The default probabilities here are starting points drawn from how these businesses typically convert, not universal truths. Once you have thirty or forty closed deals in a pipeline, calculate the real conversion rate from each stage to won and replace the defaults. The important rule is that probability belongs to the stage, not to the rep. The moment individual reps can override it, your weighted forecast stops being a forecast.
Time-in-stage is your early warning system
Every stage below has a healthy duration. A deal that has been in discovery for six weeks is not a slow deal, it is a dead deal that nobody has been willing to mark lost. Setting an alert on each stage duration surfaces those before the end of the quarter, which is the only time it is still useful to know.
Adapting a template to your business
Start with the template closest to your model, then delete rather than add. Most teams build eleven stages when seven would do, and every extra stage is another field a rep will not update. If two stages always change on the same day, they are one stage. If a stage has no exit criterion you can test, it is a status, and it belongs in a field instead.