How do I set up a pipeline for how my customers move through my business?

A pipeline is a named path of stages a contact moves through. You build one by adding its stages in order, then giving each stage a task template telling your team what to actually do when a contact reaches it.

Create a pipeline

1. Open Team management, then Setup, then the Pipelines tab.
2. Click New pipeline, give it a name, and save. It appears in your pipeline list right away.
3. If you want this to be the pipeline new contacts go into by default, click Set as default on it.

Add a stage

1. On the pipeline you want to edit, click Add stage.
2. Give it a title and a category (a short label for what kind of stage it is, like intake or closing).
3. Set how many hours a contact is expected to spend at this stage before it's considered overdue, and a default priority.
4. Pick a colour and an icon so the stage is easy to spot at a glance in your pipeline views.
5. Set two numbers that control how a contact is treated over time: how heavily this stage counts when we work out how "aged" a contact looks (leave it at 1 unless you specifically want this stage weighted more or less than the others), and how many days a contact can sit in this stage before they're flagged as dormant, meaning nothing has moved for a while and it's worth a look.
6. Save. The stage is added to the end of the pipeline, and you can reorder stages afterward.

Add a task template to a stage

Open a stage's task templates to add the actual job a staff member does when a contact reaches it, its title, instructions, priority and how long it's given. This is what turns "a contact is in this stage" into "someone on your team has something concrete to do."

Reordering, editing and deleting

Move a stage up or down to change where it sits in the pipeline. Editing a stage's settings changes what's expected going forward; it doesn't rewrite anything already logged against a contact who passed through it earlier. Deleting a pipeline or a stage is permanent.

Who can do this

Setting up pipelines needs an organization admin and an account with Team management turned on. See Who can set up pipelines, journeys and automations for my team?