Build your sales pipeline & stages

Three words, one idea. A lead is a single opportunity attached to a contact. A pipeline is the ordered set of stages that lead moves through. At any moment a lead sits at exactly one stage, and that stage is how everyone reads where the deal stands.

This guide is about building that pipeline as an admin. For the day-to-day — creating leads, moving them, filtering the table — see Contacts, leads & pipelines.

Pipelines live under Settings → Pipelines. The page lists every pipeline you’ve built; + New pipeline starts a fresh one. If you’ve never made one, you’ll see a “Create your first pipeline” prompt instead — and the Leads screen will send people here until one exists.

Creating or opening a pipeline gives you the same editor: a Pipeline name at the top, then two tabs — Stages and Data Fields. Nothing saves until you hit Save (or Create on a new one), so you can lay out the whole pipeline before committing it.

A brand-new pipeline starts with no stages at all — there’s nothing pre-filled. You build the exact steps your business uses. On the Stages tab, Add new stage appends a row; type its name; repeat. Drag the handle to reorder, and the trash icon removes a stage.

Order is everything here, because the order you arrange them in is the pipeline. The very first stage has a special job: it’s where every new lead lands by default. So make stage one your true starting point — “New”, “Enquiry”, “Lead received” — not a step that assumes work has already happened.

Here’s the part that surprises people coming from other CRMs: Exabloom has no separate “Mark as won / lost” button. A lead’s progress is its stage — there’s no second status sitting alongside it in the app. So the way you record an outcome is to make it a stage.

End your pipeline with the closes you care about — an Enrolled (or “Won”, “Signed”) stage and a Lost stage. Moving a lead there is what “closing” means in practice, and because the Analytics dashboard counts leads by stage, those outcome stages become your won/lost numbers automatically.

The second tab, Data Fields, controls which fields are visible when viewing or editing leads in this pipeline. Fields are grouped under Lead Information and Contact Person Information; flip a toggle to include or drop each one. A running count shows how many are enabled.

This is where your custom fields earn their keep: any lead or contact field you’ve defined shows up in this list, ready to switch on. Two pipelines can show entirely different sets — a renewals pipeline needn’t carry the fields a new-business one needs. See Set up custom fields to create them.

You can have as many pipelines as you sell in distinct ways. A tuition centre might run New enrolments and Renewalsside by side; each has its own stages and its own visible fields. The Leads screen shows one pipeline at a time — people switch between them from the dropdown at the top-left of the table.

• Make a new one when the steps genuinely differ — a different journey, not just a different filter on the same one.
• Duplicate an existing pipeline to clone its stages and fields as a starting point, then adjust — faster than rebuilding from scratch.
• Lean on stages and filters instead of a new pipeline when it’s really the same process viewed differently — saved views slice one pipeline cheaply.

Pipelines aren’t set in stone. To rename a stage, edit its text and save — leads sitting in it come along under the new name. To reorder, drag the handle. Both are safe and non-destructive.

Deleting a stage is where care is needed. If the stage is empty, it’s removed straight away. If it still holds leads, Exabloom stops and asks what to do with them:

• Move to another stage — pick where its leads should go, and they’re all reassigned there. This is almost always what you want.
• Delete leads in this stage — permanently removes every lead sitting in it. Use only when those opportunities truly no longer matter.

Starting points you can adapt. Notice each one begins with a clean intake stage and ends with explicit outcomes.

• Pipelines start empty. There are no default stages — build the exact steps your business uses, in order.
• Stage one is the landing pad. New leads default to the first stage, so make it your genuine starting point.
• Outcomes are stages. There’s no Won/Lost button — end the pipeline with the closed stages you want to report on.
• Deleting a busy stage is a decision. You must move its leads or delete them, and type CONFIRM. Moving is the safe default.
• Data Fields are per-pipeline. Each pipeline chooses its own visible fields, so two can look completely different.
• One pipeline shows at a time. The Leads table is scoped to the pipeline picked in the dropdown — switch there to see another.