Work deals through your pipeline

A deal is a sale your team is working: what it is worth, where it stands, who it is with, and the support conversations that led to it. Deals live on the Deals page at https://app.contactroll.com/deals.

Your pipeline and its stages

On the Free plan, an organization has one pipeline; more come with Standard and Plus.

Every organization starts with a pipeline: New lead, Qualified, Demo booked, Trial and Proposal, then Won and Lost. Each stage carries a win probability, which the board uses to show a weighted total.

To change the stages, press Edit stages on the Deals page. There you can rename a stage, set its probability, put the open stages in order, add a stage, and remove one that holds no deals. Won and Lost stay at the end. This is for an Owner, an Administrator, or a role your organization allows to change pipelines and stages.

Guidance for each stage

Under each stage on the stages page there is a box for guidance: up to 1,000 characters on what to do at this stage and what should be true before a deal moves on. Save it with the stage's own Save. Your team sees it on every deal in that stage, as plain text with its line breaks kept. A new organization's five open stages come with starter guidance you can change.

Add a deal

1. Open Deals and press New deal.
2. Fill in the Name, Amount, Currency, Stage, Expected close and Owner, and choose a Company if there is one.
3. Press Add deal.

Amounts are kept exactly, in your organization's currency unless you choose another. On a deal's page you can add its contacts (one is the primary), link the cases that led to it, and add tasks.

The board and the list

At a desk, the board shows a column for each stage, and you can drag a card from one column to another. On a phone the same stages are a list. Every card has Move to…, which opens the stages as buttons: it works with a keyboard and on a phone.

The stage bar on a deal

Across the top of a deal's page, the stage bar shows the pipeline's open stages as a row of arrows, then the end step. Stages the deal has passed carry a tick, its own stage stands out, and the stages ahead are empty. On a phone the bar is one line, such as "Demo booked · stage 3 of 5", and opens into a list.

Press a stage to see it below the bar. Pressing a stage only shows it; the button underneath does the moving:

• On the deal's own stage you see its guidance, "In this stage for 12 days", and the deal's next open task. The button reads Mark {stage} complete, which moves the deal to the next stage, or Mark as won on the last open stage.
• On any other stage, the button reads Move to {stage}.

Move to… also stays beside the bar, with every stage in one place, Lost included.

Won and lost

When you move a deal to Lost, ContactRoll asks for a Reason first, and the deal keeps it. Won and Lost record the day the deal closed. A won deal shows every step ticked. A lost deal shows the steps ticked up to the stage it was lost from, a cross on the end step, and its reason under the bar. Moving a closed deal back to an open stage reopens it.

History

Every change to a deal's stage, amount, owner and expected close date is written to its history, with who made it and when. ContactRoll writes the history itself, so it stays exactly as it happened. Flows can also act when a deal is created, moves or closes; see the article on flows.