The deals board and the seven stages
Seven columns that are not a default. Each one is this business saying what has to be true before an enquiry is allowed to move, and six workflows read them by name.
Open the deals board. What you are looking at is the only picture of this business anybody in it agrees on — and every column in it was a decision, not a setting somebody accepted.
There are 96 enquiries on it today, in 7 stages. Five of those stages are places an enquiry can be while the work is still alive; two of them are endings.
The five stages of an open case
| Stage | What has to be true | Here today |
|---|---|---|
| New Enquiry | Enquiry received. First response target is 22 minutes. | 18 |
| Contacted | Spoken to. Requirement and rough income established; no rate quoted yet. | 22 |
| Appointment Booked | Advisor meeting booked at a branch, or a home visit arranged. | 14 |
| Documents Received | KYC and income documents in. Eligibility can now be run across the panel. | 12 |
| Offer Sent | Sanction letter or offer comparison shared. Applicant deciding. | 9 |
New Enquiry
- What has to be true
- Enquiry received. First response target is 22 minutes.
- Here today
- 18
Contacted
- What has to be true
- Spoken to. Requirement and rough income established; no rate quoted yet.
- Here today
- 22
Appointment Booked
- What has to be true
- Advisor meeting booked at a branch, or a home visit arranged.
- Here today
- 14
Documents Received
- What has to be true
- KYC and income documents in. Eligibility can now be run across the panel.
- Here today
- 12
Offer Sent
- What has to be true
- Sanction letter or offer comparison shared. Applicant deciding.
- Here today
- 9
Read the descriptions rather than the names. “Spoken to. Requirement and rough income established; no rate quoted yet.” That is not a status, it is a rule about what an advisor is allowed to have done. A board whose columns are Enquiry / In Progress / Won tells you nothing and can be argued with forever; this one cannot.
And the two ways it ends
| Stage | What has to be true | Here today |
|---|---|---|
| Disbursed | Funds released. Sent to Meta as a Purchase carrying the sanctioned amount. | 15 |
| Lost | Panel could not fund it, or they went elsewhere. Reason is mandatory. | 6 |
Disbursed
- What has to be true
- Funds released. Sent to Meta as a Purchase carrying the sanctioned amount.
- Here today
- 15
Lost
- What has to be true
- Panel could not fund it, or they went elsewhere. Reason is mandatory.
- Here today
- 6
Losing properly is a stage. It has a description that makes a reason mandatory, which is the difference between a pipeline you can learn from and one that just gets quietly shorter. When a client says “we don't really mark things lost”, this column is the conversation.
The number beside each stage is a forecast
Every stage carries a probability — 10% at the first, 80% at the last one before the end. It is what turns a list of enquiries into a number somebody can plan against, and it is why the two endings are 100% and 0% rather than labels.
These percentages are a claim about this business, made by this business. They are the first thing to check with a client and the first thing they will want to change — usually downwards, and usually because somebody has been counting an “Offer Sent” as nearly-money for years.
The names are load-bearing. The descriptions are not.
This is the thing to carry out of this lesson, and it is not visible from the board itself. Stage names are matched as text inside the automations you will read in Module 2 and Module 3:
- A follow-up cadence that runs only while an enquiry sits at one named stage, and stops the moment it moves.
- A daily sweep that ignores anything already at one of the two ending stages.
- A booking workflow that writes one specific stage name onto the enquiry when the meeting is in the diary.
Rename a stage and those stop working silently. No error, no failed run — a condition simply never matches again, and a client notices six weeks later that the follow-ups stopped. Descriptions and colours are free to change; names are an interface.
You do not have to take that on trust for long. By the end of Conditions and branches you will be able to open any of those workflows and see the stage name sitting in a condition box, in quotes.
Change one thing — edit a description, not a name
- Open the stage settings and read all
7descriptions in order, as if you were being onboarded. - Find the one you would argue with for a lending business, and rewrite it. Keep the name exactly as it is.
- Save, reload the board, and confirm nothing else moved.
- Say out loud why that was safe and why renaming the stage would not have been.
Try it
- Work out which stage you would expect to be the fullest in a healthy lending pipeline, then compare it with the numbers above.
- Find the stage with the most money sitting in it and decide whether that is good news or a warning.
Next: Inside one enquiry: value, stage, source, next step — one enquiry, opened up, and the four fields on it that everything else in this org is built on.
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