Sales Pipeline

How it works

The mechanics of this kit, plainly — what runs and when, where the data lands, and what you look at.

• Pipeline sweep runs weekday mornings · 8am and keeps the Pipeline dashboard fresh. Each working morning — reads what arrived, keeps each deal's last step, next step and tasks current, and moves a stage only where the mail shows it moved.
• Forecast roll-up runs fridays · 5pm and keeps the Pipeline dashboard fresh. Friday afternoons — totals the week, recomputes the weighted forecast and the win rate, and says what actually moved.
• Lead brief runs when you ask, from the call desk. Before you dial — a short brief on one lead, written into the lead book.
• Organisation research runs when you ask, from the call desk. The figures your team keeps on every organisation, looked up once and shared by everyone who calls it.
• Team calling digest runs weekday mornings · 8:30am. Weekday mornings — yesterday's calling per person, against each one's own targets.
• What is captured lands in the Deal book dataset, which lives at Data/Deal Book in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• What is captured lands in the Deal tasks dataset, which lives at Data/Deal Tasks in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• What is captured lands in the Lead book dataset, which lives at Data/Lead Book in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• What is captured lands in the Call log dataset, which lives at Data/Call Log in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• What is captured lands in the Discount approvals dataset, which lives at Data/Discount Approvals in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• What is captured lands in the Follow-up templates dataset, which lives at Data/Follow-up Templates in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• What is captured lands in the Team targets dataset, which lives at Data/Team Targets in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• The Pipeline dashboard reads from the dataset and shows, at a glance: stage · this deal · weighted open pipeline · win rate, last four quarters · deals on the book · the pipeline, by stage · where the quarter is heading · stuck deals — longest in one stage · win rate, quarter by quarter · next actions, by when they are due · every deal, where it stands · the pipeline board · tasks, soonest first · how this board works · the book.
• The Calling dashboard reads from the dataset and shows, at a glance: dials today · minutes talked today · this lead · call · today's calls, by how they ended · earlier calls to this lead · your calling list.

The wiring, in one breath: Bracken holds Deal capture · Bracken holds Pipeline review · Bracken holds Call brief · Bracken holds Touch sequences · Bracken holds Discounts and close reasons · Bracken holds Template follow-ups · Bracken holds Hand-over note · Call brief writes to Lead book · Lead book shown by Calling · Call log shown by Calling · Deal capture writes to Deal book · Pipeline sweep writes to Deal book · Deal capture writes to Deal tasks · Pipeline sweep writes to Deal tasks · Touch sequences writes to Deal tasks · Touch sequences writes to Deal book · Discounts and close reasons writes to Discount approvals · Discounts and close reasons writes to Deal book · Template follow-ups writes to Follow-up templates · Template follow-ups reads Deal book · Hand-over note reads Deal book · Hand-over note reads Deal tasks · Hand-over note reads Discount approvals · Deal book shown by Pipeline · Deal tasks shown by Pipeline · Pipeline kept fresh by Pipeline sweep · Pipeline kept fresh by Forecast roll-up · Pipeline sweep run by Bracken · Forecast roll-up run by Bracken · Lead brief writes to Lead book · Organisation research writes to Lead book · Bracken runs Lead brief · Bracken runs Organisation research · Call log read by Team calling digest · Team targets read by Team calling digest · Bracken runs Team calling digest.

Getting the most from it

A kit earns its place when it changes what you look at and what you say, not when it is installed. This is the rhythm that makes it pay.

• Read the board on Monday morning and again after the Friday roll-up. Monday tells you what the Pipeline sweep moved over the weekend and what has gone stale; Friday tells you what your open pipeline now weighs and which deals changed it. Stuck deals is the honest signal — it is measured, not judged: more than thirty days in one stage, longest first.
• Give every open deal a value and a probability, even roughly. The forecast is nothing but value times probability summed over the open deals, so a deal with a blank probability is simply not in it — and Bracken says how many were left out rather than guessing on your behalf. That is the whole arrangement: the numbers are yours, the arithmetic is its.
• Tell Bracken what YOU call your stages in the first conversation. The book stores six fixed ones so the funnel can be drawn in order, but Bracken speaks in your words from then on — "Discovery", "Pricing", "Paperwork" — and writes the six underneath. It is one sentence and it makes every later exchange sound like your business rather than a CRM.
• Say a move the way you would say it across the desk — "Northwind moved to proposal, sixty per cent, sending terms Friday" — and Deal capture moves the stage, stamps the day it moved, and files the next action with its date. That day stamp is what Stuck deals counts from, so saying it in passing is what keeps the ageing honest. When a thread turns out never to have been a deal, say so too: it is set aside and loses its stage, so it leaves the funnel and every figure without being deleted, and without being called lost and quietly depressing your win rate.
• Ask for the walk before a forecast conversation: "walk me through the pipeline". Pipeline review reads it back stage by stage with values, probabilities and days in stage, and shows the arithmetic behind the forecast so you can check it rather than trust it. Ask about one deal by name and you get that deal, plus what has come up about the client in conversation.
• For the working day, use the app that comes with the kit. Today lists the deals that need something from you, Deals and Board hold the pipeline, and Forecast shows the arithmetic behind the week's figure; moving a card on the board moves the deal in the book. Work the call list from the app's Call desk: press Call and your browser rings the lead, or your own phone rings first if you prefer, while Bracken briefs you on who they are. When you hang up, the outcome is one key and the call joins the lead's history. If your team records calls, an admin can turn on a short notice the other person hears before they hear you.
• Plan a run of follow-ups in one sentence: "a call on Thursday, an email the Monday after, a last call that Friday". Touch sequences files each step as a dated task on that deal, counts any date you did not give aloud so you can check the sum before it files, and keeps the deal's next action on the earliest step still open. Bracken never chooses how many touches there are or how far apart they fall, so say your usual spacing once and it is kept as a preference. A run does not stop by itself when a buyer replies: tick a step off, or ask for the rest to be dropped.
• Say a discount in passing: "Halden want ten per cent off the first year, I have put it to finance". Discounts and close reasons keeps it on Discount approvals against the deal, then files the decision, who made it and when, as soon as you say how it came back. Ask what is waiting for a decision and the longest wait comes first. Bracken never approves, declines or advises on a discount, and an approved one changes nothing on the deal until you give it a new value. Nor does it work out a discounted price or write the quote: the Kit does not write proposals or quotes.
• Tell Bracken why a deal was won or lost in your own words, the day it closes or any time after: "went in-house", "chose us for the support". It never asks why unprompted and never supplies a reason. When you want the pattern, ask "why do we lose?": it offers groups as questions, you name them, and from then on it counts the deals in each group and shows the sum.
• Keep the follow-ups you write again and again as templates: "save that as my after-proposal note". Template follow-ups keeps your wording exactly as you wrote it, so mark the blanks the way you like, [name] or {deal}. "Use my after-proposal note for Northwind" then fills them from the deal's own record and puts the draft in your email drafts. A blank the record cannot fill stays a bracket for you, and a price, a discount or a term is never filled in. When a deal is won, ask for "the hand-over note for Northwind": Hand-over note writes it from the deal's own record into your vault under Sales/Hand-overs, lists what the record does not hold so delivery knows what to ask, and sends it to no one. Bracken does not offer one unasked.

Make it yours

Nothing here is fixed. The pieces are ordinary agents, routines, datasets and dashboards, so anything you know about shaping those applies. Retire whatever earns nothing.

Things people usually change first

Say any of these in chat, or edit them on the kit’s page in the app.

• What you call each stage, and how your words map onto the six the book stores — say it once and Bracken speaks in yours from then on.
• What a probability means to you, and a quarter target if you set one; the target is drawn on the forecast, as a plain subtraction and nothing more.
• What counts as a deal worth filing — senders and kinds of thread the sweep should never file again.
• When the Pipeline sweep and the Forecast roll-up run, or pausing either and keeping the book by hand.
• Whether Bracken may read a CRM you already keep — HubSpot, once you connect it — read only, and only because you said so.
• How you space your follow-ups, said once, and the names of the groups you put your win and loss reasons in.
• Who signs off a discount, and above what level, if you have a rule: Bracken reads it back to you as a question and never applies it for you.
• The wording of your follow-up templates, as many as you like, and which of them you have stopped using.

Your first run

Installing starts a short setup conversation — not a form. Answer roughly, correct later.

1. Installing ends at the first sweep's own screen, where the email grant is asked for — that is the whole pitch, so the ask sits in front, where it makes sense. Start it and Bracken reads back through six months of your email for the threads where a proposal, a quote, an estimate or a scope was sent or asked for. Each becomes a deal on the book with the client, the stage the thread had reached and the day it reached it — and with the value, the probability, the start date and the term left blank, because those are your figures and nothing here will invent them. It reads; it never replies, never drafts, and never touches a CRM. It is a real run and uses credits like any other.
2. When that first sweep finishes, Bracken leaves one card with what it found — how many deals, across how many clients — and an invitation to go through them: which of these are really deals (anything that was delivery, a supplier quote or an internal thread is set aside, never deleted), what you call your own stages, roughly what each deal is worth, and what a probability actually means to you. That is also where you name the deals agreed on a call the mailbox never saw, and set a quarter target if you have one.
3. Bracken starts from what 1Presence already knows: what you have told it before, and any proposals, quotes or pipeline sheets in your vault. It offers what it finds for a yes, and asks only for the gaps.
4. Skip the sweep and the book still works by hand: Bracken asks what you call your stages, what a probability means to you, and then takes the deals you can think of one at a time. Nothing in that conversation touches your email, and the Pipeline sweep waits on your Routines screen until you choose to run it.
5. Whatever is still blank waits on the Kit page with a way back to Bracken, and Bracken offers it once the next time you talk: a deal with no value, no probability or no next action, or one agreed on a call or in a meeting that email never saw. Tell it a part does not apply to you, or that you have finished setting up, and it stops asking.
6. After that the sweep runs each working morning at eight, reads only what is new, and moves a stage only where the mail plainly shows it moved — a proposal sent, terms exchanged, an acceptance, a no. Silence never moves anything. It raises a card only when something moved or something is due. Then every Friday at five the roll-up recomputes the forecast and the win rate, redraws the projection, and leaves one short card: what moved, what the forecast is and which deals changed it.

Watch the first pass, then tell it what you would have done differently — that correction teaches it more than any setup could.

The essentials

Learning, preferences and run costs work the same in every kit — so they are covered once, in the Kits guide.

Living with a Kit — the Kits guide →

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