The concept of pipelines in business—especially in sales, operations, and after-service—has evolved significantly over the past century. It began in 1898, when marketer Elmo Lewis introduced the AIDA model (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), which laid the groundwork for understanding how prospects progress toward becoming customers. While not a "pipeline" in name, AIDA served as an early framework for visualizing the buyer’s journey.
In the 1950s and 1960s, companies began formalizing sales process management. Models like the Sales Funnel gained popularity, helping businesses map out stages of engagement such as awareness, interest, consideration, and conversion. This era saw the emergence of the Sales Pipeline as a more structured way to visualize and track lead progression across specific stages.
By the 1970s, the pipeline concept extended beyond sales. Businesses began to apply similar methodology to post-sale service, support workflows, and even inventory and operations. This shift reflected a growing emphasis on managing entire customer relationships, not just initial transactions.
The introduction of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software in the 1990s and early 2000s helped solidify pipeline thinking in business operations. Platforms like Salesforce (founded in 1999) enabled teams to automate, track, and report on sales and service pipelines with unprecedented precision. Companies could now forecast more accurately, streamline communications, and manage leads, deals, and customer issues from a centralized system.
With the rise of digital tools, inbound marketing, and automation workflows, pipeline thinking matured even further. Modern businesses use integrated pipelines that connect sales, marketing, service, and customer success into one cohesive customer journey. These pipelines are no longer static charts—they're dynamic systems that align cross-functional teams around shared metrics, handoffs, and outcomes.
Pipelines provide a clear, interactive overview of your business efforts. Each pipeline represents a specific function or process—such as a Sales pipeline for commercial contracts, an Operations pipeline for order fulfillment, or an After-Service pipeline for turning recent customers into advocates (or cycling them back into a new deal in your sales process).
If you’re selling products or services, you already have a pipeline—whether it's managed in software, scribbled on a whiteboard, or tracked mentally. The goal is to define and refine that pipeline to the point where stages are clearly outlined, and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) can be developed. This allows any team member to step in, follow the process, and contribute effectively.
If everything lives in your head, chances are your team is lost—constantly dropping the ball or needing to ask for direction.
When you move your processes into a live, visible pipeline, you gain instant clarity into:
Modern pipeline software offers a powerful advantage: automation. These tools are built to integrate with the other platforms and services you already use. For example, consider a real estate mortgage pipeline built in HubSpot:
There are multiple steps involved in qualifying a prospect, verifying their eligibility, and collecting required signatures. With integrated tools like DocuSign or PandaDoc, you can automate the generation and delivery of these documents at the right pipeline stages.
Let’s say a lead reaches a stage where a document needs to be signed. HubSpot can send deal data to your document service via API. The document is generated and sent to the prospect automatically. When the prospect signs it, the document service notifies HubSpot, which in turn moves the deal to the next pipeline stage.
This cuts overhead and reduces friction for both your team and the customer:
When implemented correctly, this type of pipeline automation is always a win.
A stage is a step—or column—in your pipeline that represents a specific point in your workflow. While your pipeline captures the overall effort (like a Commercial Contracts Pipeline or Residential Contracts Pipeline), the stages define the sequential steps your team must take to move a deal, task, or request from start to finish.
For example, if you handle both commercial and residential sales, it's wise to create separate pipelines for each. These deal types often follow different processes, involve different team members, and require different touchpoints. Running all deals in a single pipeline creates clutter and confusion. Segmenting pipelines by team or deal type helps bifurcate your efforts for clarity and efficiency.
The stages in a sales pipeline should directly reflect the interactions required to move a prospect from “showed actionable interest” to “closed-won” or “closed-lost.”
These might include:
If skipping a step would delay or prevent the sale, then that step belongs as a distinct stage in the pipeline.
In an operations pipeline, stages track the internal fulfillment process.
Take retail order fulfillment as an example:
Each stage represents a discrete action your team takes to fulfill the order and ensure customer satisfaction.
After-service pipelines help turn customers into repeat buyers or brand advocates.
For instance, in residential mortgage sales, you might not need a full operations pipeline—maybe just a 30-day warranty monitoring pipeline. But an after-service pipeline can be powerful:
In e-commerce, your after-service efforts might be simpler—like including a thank-you card in packaging. In that case, a full pipeline may not be necessary, but where there's multi-step follow-up, a structured pipeline keeps your team aligned.
Your pipeline stages should accurately and thoroughly describe your required customer interactions—nothing more, nothing less. While pipelines can be used for internal operations, the methodology (and most tools built for it) are optimized for customer-facing engagement. The stages you define are the building blocks for standardizing and automating your success.
Pipelines serve a wide variety of purposes and can be found in many tools. HubSpot and Salesforce are two major providers in this space. There are also platforms specifically built around pipeline functionality—Monday.com is frequently mentioned, though I often find myself moving clients from Monday.com to HubSpot for better integration and scalability. I’ve also built fully functional, interactive pipelines in tools like Notion.so.
In HubSpot specifically, there are several types of pipelines depending on your subscription:
Why does this matter? Because what you interact with in the pipeline—the individual units of work—go by different names depending on the software and context. For simplicity, I’m going to refer to them as cards, though in your system they may be called:
A card should hold all the essential information required to:
In a real estate scenario, for example, you might need to programmatically generate documents. This requires data like:
These details need to live on the card so they can be passed into workflows, like document generation via an API.
Modern tools like HubSpot allow you to enforce stage-specific data requirements. For instance, you could create a rule like:
“A deal cannot move to the Document Generation stage unless Address and Full Name are populated.”
This reduces errors, automates validation, and ensures your team doesn’t advance cards that are missing critical data.
Most platforms also allow you to create custom properties or fields on cards. This lets you tailor the card object to your business needs. Additionally, many integrations (especially within HubSpot’s ecosystem) will automatically add new properties that enhance your ability to manage, enrich, or analyze your pipeline.
Just as it’s important to define your pipeline stages, it’s equally important to define:
Properly mapping data requirements across stages ensures you don’t hit blockers and your cards can move fluidly toward a closed outcome—whether that’s a sale, a resolved support ticket, or a completed order.
Let me say something I’ve repeated hundreds of times just in the past year:
The software does not define your process. You define your process—and then apply it to the software.
Most tools—HubSpot, Salesforce, and others—come with prebuilt pipeline models for sales, support, and service. And while that can be a helpful starting point, I regularly speak with clients who are uncertain and trying to force-fit their operations into whatever defaults the software gives them.
This is backwards.
If you're already in business, you already have a process. It may be messy, inconsistent, and undocumented—but it exists. You know what needs to happen from the moment a prospect shows actionable interest until they become a happy customer.
So don’t change your business to fit the software. Change the software to fit your business.
Start with a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).
Imagine handing off the responsibility of handling all incoming deals to a brand-new person on your team. What would you need to teach them for them to succeed?
Write that down. That’s your process.
Now go through that SOP and highlight the key moments of interaction or responsibility between your business and your customer.
These are your pipeline stages.
Document them clearly—not for the software, but for your team. The pipeline configuration should just reflect this real-world process. Your SOP should be useful even if you're managing leads with pen and paper.
With your process and stages in place, identify what can and should be automated.
Important: Not everything should be automated.
I’ve had many consultations where we concluded automation was unnecessary or unworkable. For example, a heavily customized contract may require manual review and generation.
Automations like this help you keep momentum and reduce manual busywork—without sacrificing control or accuracy.
Next, identify what data you need from a prospect at each stage to move the deal forward.
For example:
Important: Determine if the information is static (doesn’t change across purchases) or dynamic (may differ with each new purchase).
A common mistake I see: storing deal-specific information—like pricing—on the Contact object in HubSpot. This causes that data to be overwritten with every new deal, which wrecks historical insights.
Instead, store purchase data on the Deal itself. That way, each transaction gets its own data set, and you retain accurate, usable analytics across all purchases.
Tools like HubSpot let you sync properties between objects—like copying a contact’s name and address onto a deal.
This is great for static properties that you want available on the deal card (e.g., for automations, document generation, or ease of access).
Just be intentional with how you design your data structure. Your reporting depends on it.
Once you’ve clearly defined everything required to build an effective pipeline, actually setting it up in software is usually the easy part.
Most modern platforms—like HubSpot—have intuitive interfaces for creating and naming your pipeline stages. You’ll typically find these settings under Pipeline Settings or Sales Pipelines. Just map your real-world stages into the software one-by-one.
Where it gets tricky is when you begin:
These are areas where the learning curve can spike, especially if you're working in a team environment with multiple user tiers.
Before diving into advanced settings, invest 30–60 minutes in a crash course or official training video for your chosen software.
Most platforms (including HubSpot) offer quick-start videos or pipeline-specific lessons that can save you hours of confusion.
Here’s the core principle again, one more time:
You define your process to the software—not the other way around.
By clearly documenting your process before touching any software, you’re setting yourself up for:
✳️ Right tool + wrong process = chaos.
✅ Right process + well-configured tool = momentum.