Deals and pipelines
A normal CRM lets you drag a card anywhere. This one asks you why.
A pipeline where every card can be dragged to any stage is a picture of what people wish had happened. Here, moving a deal forward out of a stage that still has required artifacts missing is blocked. You can override it — nobody is going to lose a deal to a form — but the override costs you a sentence explaining yourself, and that sentence is stored against the stage you left, alongside the list of exactly what you skipped, where the stage grader will read it.
How it works
What happens when you move a card
One gate, one deliberate escape hatch, and one honest limit.
The gate checks the stage you are leaving
Not the one you are entering. Every advance path — the board, the deal form, the mobile API — funnels through the same check, so the rule cannot be true on one screen and false on another. If the departing stage’s required artifacts are attached, nothing happens and you never see it.
An override is recorded, not waived
If they are not, you are shown what is missing and where it attaches. Writing a reason lets the move through and creates a note tagged to the departing stage, flagged as an override and carrying the list of what was skipped. Forecast conversations get much shorter when the answer to “why is this at proposal” is already written down.
It gates forward moves only
Backward moves and closing a deal won or lost are not gated. A rep correcting a mistake should not have to argue with the software, and a deal that is lost is lost whether or not the paperwork was tidy. Saying that plainly is better than implying a wall that is not there.
In the product
The board, and the stage hub behind a card.
Per-step qualification
Qualification that knows which step the deal is on
Most CRMs ask the same seven qualification questions on every stage and keep one answer for the life of the deal. A budget question means something different at discovery than it does at proposal, so here each step gets its own wording and its own recorded answer.
Answers recorded per step, in the step’s own words
Each qualification item is asked in the wording that fits the step the deal is on, and the answer is kept against that step. The deal still has one current answer for every report and probability that reads it; underneath, there is a history of what the rep said about each item at each step, and when. A row in that history only exists when somebody actually changed an answer, so its timestamp is a real claim about a real moment.
The wording ships with sensible defaults and is yours to change: an administrator edits it per item and per step on the Qualification Map settings screen, and can restore the defaults at any time.
Steps that own their checklist, to-dos and gates
A step in your sales playbook is not just a column on the board. Its definition carries its own checklist, its own to-dos and its own gates, so what a rep needs to do at discovery is written once, in the step, and shown wherever that step is worked. The documents a step marks as required are what the exit gate above checks. Fact-based requirements exist as well, but they are switched off on a default install, so nothing on this page blocks a move beyond the document gate already described.
Skipping a step costs a real reason, and is recorded
Overriding the gate needs a reason of at least a full sentence — a few characters typed to get past the box are refused and handed back to be finished, not discarded. The reason is written in the same transaction as the move, so a recorded skip can never describe a move that did not happen, and moving forward past qualification the deal has not earned is filed the same way, with the rep’s reason attached.
Uploads tagged with their step, and a home for the rest
Every recording, transcript and document on a deal can be tagged with the step it belongs to, which is what lets each step’s hub show its own evidence. Anything uploaded without a step is not lost in a general pile: it waits in a “needs a step” panel until somebody files it.
Lead sources as a structure, not a sentence
Where a deal came from is recorded in three levels — a main source (inbound or outbound), a sub-source, and for campaigns the actual campaign record — so “inbound from a campaign” and “outbound for the same campaign” are different, reportable facts. The familiar readable source line is still composed from those three levels, so exports and integrations that read it see no change.
Who it is for
For anyone who has run a pipeline review
The value here is not the board. It is that the board is telling the truth on Friday afternoon.
- A sales manager whose forecast keeps being wrong in the same direction.
- An account executive who would rather be prompted than asked about it afterwards.
- A business selling more than one way, needing more than one pipeline with different rules.
- An owner who wants to know what was skipped, not just what was closed.
Related
Questions
The things people actually ask.
Can I really not move a deal?
You can always move it. What you cannot do is move it forward past a missing requirement silently. Explaining takes a sentence — a reason too short to say anything is handed back — and the sentence is the point, because it is the thing that is normally lost.
Who sees the override?
It sits on the deal, tagged to the stage that was left, and the stage grader reads it. It is visible history rather than a private log.
Can I have more than one pipeline?
Yes, with their own stages and their own per-stage requirements, and you can create one from a template rather than building it out field by field.
What are stage artifacts?
The documents and stage notes attached to a particular step of the deal, gathered into one hub per stage. That is what the exit gate is checking for, so the requirement and the evidence live in the same place. Anything uploaded without a step waits in a “needs a step” panel.
Can qualification questions change by stage?
Yes. Each item is worded for the step the deal is on, the answer is kept against that step, and an administrator can change the wording per step on the Qualification Map settings screen.
Try to drag a deal past its own requirements.
What happens next is the difference between a board and a process.