Business Improvement

Build a simple sales pipeline in a spreadsheet

Stop losing enquiries. See every opportunity, its next step, and how much sales you can expect.

Beginner8 min read5 steps

What you need

Define your sales stages
Keep to about five stages that match how you really sell, for example: New enquiry, Contacted, Quotation sent, Negotiating, and Won or Lost. Define what must have happened for a deal to enter each stage.
2
Set up the sheet
Use one row for each opportunity, with these columns. The most important column is the next action and its date, because a deal with no next step is likely to go quiet.
```
A: Customer       B: Contact       C: Stage
D: Value          E: Probability   F: Last contact
G: Next action    H: Next action date
```
3
Flag what needs attention
These formulas show how long since the last contact, and mark deals with an overdue next step.
```
I2:  =TODAY()-F2                     days since last contact
J2:  =IF(H2<TODAY(),"OVERDUE","")
```
4
Estimate your likely sales
Multiply each deal's value by its chance of closing, and add them together. Base the probabilities on your own past results for each stage where possible, rather than on optimism.
```
=SUMPRODUCT(D2:D100,E2:E100)
```
Review it every week
In 15 minutes each week, go through overdue actions, update the stages and close deals that have gone cold. Recording why deals were lost soon tells you what to fix.

We can plan, build and hand it over to your team.