Intern
What you actually do
Run steps 01 and 02 this week. Do not add a feature. Booked, held, proposal out, verbal, paid. Cut any stage you cannot explain in five words.
Library / Guides / Pipeline stages are jobs
Warm, hot, nurture, interested — those words feel like management. They are not. They cannot be audited, so they cannot be managed. This page is how to name stages so an intern and a CEO mean the same card.
A stage is a job with an exit rule. 'Discovery held' can be true or false. 'Warm' cannot. If two people can move the same contact for opposite reasons, the dashboard is a screenshot.
A stage is a job with an exit rule. 'Discovery held' can be true or false. 'Warm' cannot. If two people can move the same contact for opposite reasons, the dashboard is a screenshot.
Lost must be required, with reasons. Optional lost is how you keep buying the same traffic and calling it a funnel problem.
Monday: counts by stage, time-in-stage, lost reasons. Actions attach. If this feels like overhead, you are currently managing by hope.
Intern
Run steps 01 and 02 this week. Do not add a feature. Booked, held, proposal out, verbal, paid. Cut any stage you cannot explain in five words.
Operator
Protect the sequence. Lost must be required, with reasons. Optional lost is how you keep buying the same traffic and calling it a funnel problem.
CEO
Do not fund more traffic or more seats until the scoreboard in this lesson is a number you will defend. Monday: counts by stage, time-in-stage, lost reasons. Actions attach. If this feels like overhead, you are currently managing by hope.
Booked, held, proposal out, verbal, paid. Cut any stage you cannot explain in five words.
Why: Moods cannot be reported. Jobs can.
Done when: Every stage has an exit rule written under it.
Reasons required. Not 'maybe later' sitting in proposal for 90 days.
Why: Without lost reasons you repeat the leak and call it seasonality.
Done when: A card cannot vanish. It is won or lost with a reason.
A role, not 'the team'.
Why: Ambiguous owners stall. The calendar gets louder than the board.
Done when: A new hire knows who moves the card.
Cards that rot are the backlog. Not the 'ideas' list in Notion.
Why: Rot is the real work hiding under a pretty pipeline.
Done when: Monday includes aging, not just counts.
If it is not on the board, it is not a stage. Slack is not a pipeline.
Why: Shadow stages are how reporting becomes a negotiation.
Done when: One list. Printed. Finite.
If you cannot tell a teammate why this card is in this column without using the word 'feel', rewrite the column.
Ask: what does won require? If the answer takes more than one sentence, you do not have a pipeline. You have a shared hallucination with deal amounts.
Nurture is a journey, not a parking lot. A contact in nurture still has a next date. If they do not, they are lost or they are not in the system.
Lost is information. Optional lost is fiction. You cannot improve what you pretend did not happen.
Stages are labels. Nobody knows what 'won' requires.
Open the playbook ↗Working notes
The minimum CRM, pipeline, and nurture spec before you add more pages. Request the file. It arrives by email — not a public dump, not a drip of slogans.
Email and WhatsApp stay open. A call is for installing the system.