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, moves a stage only where the mail shows it moved, and redraws what has sat still longest.
• 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.
• What is captured lands in the Deal book record, which lives at Data/Deal Book in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• The Pipeline dashboard reads from the record and shows, at a glance: weighted forecast, this quarter · win rate, last four quarters · deals on the book · the pipeline, by stage · where the quarter is heading · stuck deals — longest in one stage · next actions, by when they are due · win rate, quarter by quarter · every deal, where it stands · the book — tap a deal to open it · how this board works.

The wiring, in one breath: Bracken holds Deal capture · Bracken holds Pipeline review · Deal capture writes to Deal book · Pipeline sweep writes to Deal book · Deal book 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.

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 the quarter 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.
• 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.
• When a thread turns out never to have been a deal, say so — it is set aside and loses its stage, so it leaves the funnel and every figure without being deleted and without being called lost. Calling it lost would quietly depress your win rate with a deal you never competed for.

Make it yours

Nothing here is fixed. The pieces are ordinary agents, routines, records 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.

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. 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.
4. 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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