Cookbook
Build a pipeline that matches how you actually sell
Describe how your team actually sells and let the agent build it. The only rule the product enforces is the one that stops a pipeline being a trap.
The situation
A new workspace starts with a sensible default pipeline so an agent can create a deal without asking you to configure anything first. At some point the default stops matching your team, usually within the first week, and you want the stages you actually use in standup.
What must be true when you are done
- Your stages, in your order, with your names.
- Each stage carries a default probability. It stays on the stage: a weighted forecast reads the probability standing on the deal itself, so a deal nobody has priced stays out of the total until somebody prices it.
- Every stage is marked as open, won, or lost, and the deal's status follows the stage.
Just describe it
You
Set up our pipeline. We qualify first, then scope the work, then send a proposal. Call the closed stages Won and Lost. Rough odds: ten percent at qualifying, thirty at scoping, sixty once a proposal is out.
Agent
That is the whole job. There is no separate step to mark which stage means closed-won, because the stage kind is what produces the deal's status: move a deal to Won and it becomes won. You cannot set the two inconsistently, because there is only one of them.
The one thing it will refuse
Ask for a pipeline with no closed stages and you do not get one.
You
Actually just give me Lead and Demo, we will figure out the rest later.
Agent
This is worth understanding rather than working around. A pipeline whose stages are all open is one where no deal can ever finish: every number you ask for counts everything you have ever entered, forever, and the first time you notice is the first time a forecast looks absurd. Two stages is not a shortcut to a working pipeline, it is a pipeline that will quietly lie to you in a month.
Change it later, without breaking what is in it
Reconfiguring replaces the stage set as a whole rather than patching it, which is what stops a partial edit leaving you with no way to close. Deals in stages you keep stay where they are.
You
Add a Negotiation stage between Proposal and Won, at seventy-five percent, and leave everything else as it is.
Verify it
- Ask for the schema. Your agent reads this to learn the workspace, so if it looks right there it will behave right everywhere else.
- Move one deal to Won and read its status. It should say won without anybody setting a status field, because there is no status field to set.
Run it again
Whenever how you sell changes, which for most teams is once or twice a year. It is not a migration and there is no downtime: the stages are configuration, and the deals are records that point at them.