"Can you extend the sales pipeline through shipping?"
One division of a multi-division manufacturer we're rolling onto HubSpot asked for that this week. They want submittals, production, shipping and installation as deal stages after the award, so a rep who gets the "where's my order?" call can answer without leaving the deal record. And when a job gets cancelled during production, they log it as closed lost.
I understand the request. I still think it's the wrong design, and the reason matters for anyone building a CRM for a company that makes and ships things.
Start with what the rep gets right. In this division the relationship doesn't end at the PO. Sales stays on the job through delivery, the customer calls the rep rather than the project manager, and the invoice goes out on shipment. From where the rep sits, the sale is finished when the truck leaves. Their old CRM let them keep the deal open the whole way, so what they're asking for is "give us what we have today." Fair.
Now look at what the pipeline has to say once you do that. If a deal can still move to closed lost after the contract is signed, then your award stage is an open stage, whatever you named it. Win rate counts jobs awarded months ago as undecided. The forecast carries revenue that was booked last quarter. Stage-conversion reports measure production throughput and call it sales velocity. And every automation that fires on "deal closed" (commission, handoff, the thank-you note) either waits for shipping or fires on a stage that is no longer the end.
You can live with one of those. You can't live with all of them, and the people who pay for it are finance and the sales leader, who stop trusting the pipeline the first time the numbers argue with the bank account.
When we pushed on the "closed lost in production" scenario, the picture changed. Cancellations after award are rare. When one happens, the customer lost funding, or the site changed, or the scope got pulled. Sales did its job. The commercial deal was won and closed. What died was the project.
Recording that as a lost deal does two kinds of damage. It docks the rep for something that happened on execution, which is a conversation you'll have at commission time. And it muddies the one question everyone trusts the pipeline to answer: did we win the work or didn't we. The operations side has its own questions about a cancellation (how far into production were we, who eats the material already cut, what's the root cause), and none of those fit on a deal stage.
The person who got this right in the room was the client's project lead, who said it plainly: it's cancelled, not lost. Different word, different owner.
Here's what we're doing. The division gets the long pipeline it asked for, with the post-award stages visible on the deal, and the closed-won stage is set at Awarded. Everything after Awarded is closed-won territory. The stage-entry timestamps that drive conversion reporting stop at award, so win rate, forecast and velocity all read from the same point. Reps keep their single screen. Finance keeps a closed date that means something.
The post-award truth lives on a project record created from the won deal. It carries over the deal's activity and associations, takes a task template with the phases in it (submittals, production, shipping, installation), and runs on its own pipeline with its own stages and its own definition of done. A note logged on the deal associates to the project by default. A property that changes on one side updates the other through a workflow. Project managers see their work, reps see their customers, and nobody re-keys anything.
Two things came out of the walkthroughs that we'd missed in discovery. First, in this division the project work starts before the award, while the deal is still being won. So some stages moved to the front of the pipeline rather than the back, and that's a change that is cheap in a preview weeks before go-live and a rebuild after it. Second, the project pipeline originally ended at shipping. In the project-management walkthrough it came up that nobody then calls the customer after installation, so a follow-up stage went in. It went on the project, where the person who did the install owns the call.
The bigger lesson is where to draw the line. A sales pipeline ends where sales stops being accountable. For a lot of manufacturers that's the PO, even when the rep stays close to the job long after. Put the rest somewhere that can hold it.
If your deals can still die after the contract is signed, I'd want to know what your closed-won stage is doing. Where does your pipeline end, and does your finance team agree with the answer? Disagree with where we drew the line? Tell me why.
This came out of a client project. The story behind it, and what to check in your own portal, goes to subscribers on Thursdays. Get Thursday's note.