Why your pipeline doesn’t need any sales stages

This is a subject I’ve referred to before, but an excellent article by Don Mulhern has prompted me to promote a concept that deserves far more attention – and which is driving impressive success in the growing number of sales organisations that have embraced the idea.
Most CRM systems – and most sales methodologies – are based on the idea of the pipeline reflecting a series of sales stages which are assumed to be progressively completed over time. It is also assumed that the further we have progressed through these sales stages, the more likely an opportunity is to close.
Many systems go even further: applying the same default probability to every deal that has reached a certain stage. Even worse, many CRM implementations take the “out of the box” default percentages without ever giving any thought to their accuracy or relevance.
But complex B2B sales are – unsurprisingly –