What's the difference between a "pipeline" and the "customer journey"?
A pipeline is the general idea of stages a contact moves through. The customer journey is one specific, ready-made pipeline that also creates tasks automatically and marks when a lead becomes a customer.
These two words get confused constantly, and they're genuinely different things: a pipeline is the container, and the customer journey is one specific thing you can put in it.
A pipeline is the general idea
A pipeline is a named set of stages a contact moves through, like "New contact", "Proposal sent", "Payment request", each with its own default priority, how long it should take, a colour and an icon, and its own task templates for what a staff member should actually do at that stage. You can build as many pipelines as you need, and mark one as the default.
The customer journey is a specific, ready-made pipeline
The customer journey is a single pipeline, pre-built for you, that a whole extra layer of automation is wired to:
- It comes with a full set of stages already written, covering everything from first contact through to asking for a review, and you can either install it exactly as it is or have it drafted around your own business first.
- Once it's set up, every new contact automatically gets the whole journey's tasks created for them, not just customers you add by hand: someone who texts you or starts a web chat gets pulled in too.
- It marks the exact point where a lead becomes a customer. Everything before that point is still "selling"; everything after it treats the person as an existing customer.
You only ever have one customer journey, and it's still a pipeline underneath, you can find it in your pipeline list once it's installed. But you can have other pipelines that are just pipelines: a plain set of stages with none of the automatic task generation or the lead-to-customer marker attached.
Which one to use
If you only need to track where a contact is and hand out the right task at each stage, build a plain pipeline. If you want every new contact walked through the same set of steps automatically from first contact to getting paid, install or draft the customer journey. See How do I set up a pipeline for how my customers move through my business? and How do I set up the ready-made customer journey?.
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More in Team management: setting it up
The other guides people read alongside this one.
- How do I turn on Team management, and what does it actually add?
Team management adds a shared workspace for your staff: tasks, time tracking, schedules and a queue of work to hand out. Whether it's on for your account depends on your plan.
- How do I set up a pipeline for how my customers move through my business?
Create a pipeline, add the stages your work actually goes through, and give each stage a task template so your team knows what to do when a contact reaches it.
- How do I set up the ready-made customer journey?
Install the standard journey with one click, or have it drafted around your own business first. Either way you see exactly how many customers and tasks it creates before you confirm.
- How do I get reminded automatically when a customer is stuck on a step?
Turn on the "Stage reminders" automation to get one email a day, per customer, as their step falls due, then again if it goes overdue, then every two weeks and later monthly if they're still stuck there.
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