What is a sales pipeline?
A sales pipeline is a view of all open deals, organized by the stage each one has reached in your sales process.
Why it matters for sales teams
The pipeline shows a sales team what is coming. Managers use it to forecast revenue, spot deals that are stuck and check whether there is enough early-stage activity to hit future targets. Reps use it to decide where to spend their time.
A pipeline has stages that reflect real progress, for example: qualified, discovery, demo, proposal, negotiation, and closed won or closed lost. Each deal usually carries a value and an expected close date, so the pipeline can be totaled by stage and by period.
Example
A sales manager reviews the pipeline on Monday. Several deals have sat in "Proposal" for over a month, so she asks the reps what is blocking them. She also sees too few new deals in "Qualified" for next quarter and asks the SDR team to focus on pipeline generation.
Sales pipeline vs sales funnel
The pipeline tracks individual deals and their stages from the seller's side. The sales funnel describes how prospects narrow down from first awareness to customer, usually shown as conversion between stages. In everyday use, the two terms are often treated as the same thing.