Pipeline
Most pipelines lie in the same two places.
They lie about what closed, because closing is a drag and somebody typed the reason in a note. And they lie about what is still alive, because nothing distinguishes a deal that is progressing from one that stopped three weeks ago and nobody said so.
Both are structural. Both are fixable by refusing a gesture.
Endings
A deal can stop for a reason that is nobody's loss.
Most tools give you won and lost, so everything that merely stopped gets filed as a loss. Your loss rate is then part real and part administrative, and the reasons underneath it are worth nothing.
There is a fourth ending here, and it is deliberately quiet. It tells the deal's owner — and only when somebody else did it — and it tells nothing else at all. Pay, the forecast, the renewal clock: none of them hear a close that did not happen.
- Open—Sitting in a working stage. Countable, forecastable, ageing.
- WonCommission · forecast · renewalsReason captured, close date stamped, stage moved.
- LostCommission · forecast · reportingSame, with the reason picked from a list you control.
- AbandonedThe owner, and only if somebody else did itNot lost to anyone — it simply stopped. Kept separate so it never dilutes a loss rate.
- Competitors are two questions, not one —
Who else was in the deal, and who actually won it, are separate fields — so "we keep meeting them" and "we keep losing to them" stop being the same report.
- Reopening does not restore the old stage —
A reopened deal lands in the first working stage of its pipeline, and the close date and the written reason are cleared. It is a fresh run at the deal rather than a pretence that the close never happened.
- A closed deal can be created closed —
With its real close date. So migrating history is one step rather than create-then-close on every row.
Why
The close reason is a list you control, and it is only demanded when you have one.
Nine reasons ship — five ways a deal is lost, three ways it is won, one way it is abandoned — each with a line of helper text the close dialog shows underneath.
The rule is conditional rather than absolute. If your workspace has at least one live reason for that ending, the close asks for it. If you have none, the close goes through and the dialog says so. Nobody is blocked by a picklist an admin has not filled in yet.
- A reason belongs to one kind of ending —
Passing a lost reason to a win is refused, as is a retired one. A retired reason still renders on old deals, marked, so history stays readable.
- Moving stage overwrites the probability —
With the stage's own, forward or backward. Worth knowing before somebody hand-tunes one: the next move discards it.
›Can a deal move between pipelines?
No. A stage in another pipeline is refused by name, and the edit form has no pipeline field. Today the only route is to recreate the deal — worth knowing if you are planning to split one pipeline into two.
›Can I change the stage of several deals at once?
No. Bulk reassignment and bulk deletion exist; bulk stage changes and bulk closing do not, deliberately — closing carries a reason per deal.
›Is there a buying committee on the deal?
Not today. A deal has one primary contact; there is no way to attach several people with roles — a champion, an economic buyer, a blocker. The account's contacts are all there, but their relationship to this deal is not recorded.
›Are duplicate deals detected?
No. Accounts and contacts are scanned for duplicates and leads are checked on email; two identical deals on the same account are allowed.
Collaborators
Adding somebody to a deal grants access through the ordinary rules.
Not a second permission system running beside the first. A collaborator gets a normal share on that record, which the existing visibility rules already understand — so there is no new path by which somebody can see something they should not.
Their role on the deal is free text, because the useful answer is "solutions engineer covering the migration question", not an option from a list.
- One caution —
Removing a collaborator revokes the matching share unconditionally. If an administrator had separately granted that person access to the same deal, removing them from the team takes that away too.
See the shape this produces on a board
Stages, probabilities, and the one gesture the board refuses.