How to Set Up Your First Sales Pipeline in Senitix CRM

Setting up a sales pipeline in Senitix CRM takes five steps: agree on written exit criteria for each stage, create the pipeline and its stages, add stage guidance text and up to five key fields per stage, add or import your deals, then decide if a second pipeline is worth it. None of it arrives configured for you.

This walkthrough is for a team building its first pipeline, whether that means leaving a spreadsheet or setting up a first CRM after years of one. If you are instead moving years of stage history and custom fields out of another CRM, read our CRM implementation guide first; it covers data migration and rollout in a way a single pipeline setup does not.

What should you decide before you open Senitix CRM?

A pipeline is a shared definition of how a deal moves from first contact to closed, agreed by the people who sell and the person who manages them. Building it inside software before that conversation happens is how a company ends up with eleven stages nobody uses correctly by month three.

Before you create anything, agree on three things as a team:

• How many stages, and in what order. Five to seven is typical for a sale with one decision maker, whether you sell to businesses or to consumers; fewer if the cycle is short, more only if each added stage tracks a genuinely different buyer action.
• What ends each stage. A stage should end on something the buyer did, not something the rep believes. “Proposal sent” is checkable; “buyer is interested” is not.
• Who confirms it. Usually the rep marks the move, but the manager should be able to see the evidence on the record, not just take the rep’s word.

Step 1: Write exit criteria for every stage first

An exit criterion is the one fact that has to be true before a deal is allowed to move to the next stage, written down before you create a single stage in the software. It is not a rule Senitix CRM enforces; a stage carries guidance text and up to five key fields, and the fields are shown to the team, never forced. The pipeline only works if the team holds itself to what it wrote.

Use this checklist for each stage before you move on to Step 2:

• The one buyer action that proves the stage is done (a meeting held, a quote sent, a signature returned), not a rep’s impression.
• Who confirms it happened: the rep alone, or the rep plus a manager for anything above a size threshold.
• The field on the deal that will record it, so the criterion is checkable later, not just remembered.
• What the team does when a deal has clearly failed the criterion: moved back a stage, or marked closed lost with a reason.
• How long a deal is allowed to sit at this stage before someone asks why, so a stalled deal gets found instead of forgotten.

Skip this step and the software will still let you build a pipeline; it just won’t mean anything two months in, when every deal has quietly become the exception.

Step 2: Create the pipeline and add its stages

A pipeline in Senitix CRM is a name and an ordered list of stages that deals move through, shown as a list or a Kanban board. Add the stages in the order agreed in Step 1, not the order that reads best on a slide. A stage a deal skips for most buyers does not belong in the sequence.

Keep the stage names short and specific to what happened, not to how the rep feels about the deal: “Quote sent” tells you more than “Hot.” If your team already runs a sector-specific process (a site visit before a quote, a technical review before a contract), the industry pages show a worked pipeline for several US sectors as a starting point to adapt, not a template that ships pre-loaded.

Step 3: Add stage guidance text and key fields

Once the stages exist, each one can carry a short block of guidance text and up to five key fields: the fields your Step 1 checklist said should record the exit criterion. A rep opening a deal at “Quote sent” sees the guidance and the fields your team agreed matter at that point, such as the quote amount, the expected signer and the next follow-up date.

Two limits worth planning around: guidance text is short, so write the exit criterion as one sentence, not a paragraph, and put the detail in a linked note or document instead. And a key field is a prompt, not a gate: a deal can still move forward with a blank one, so the checklist item about who confirms the move still matters.

Step 4: Add your deals, importing the old ones and creating the new ones

With stages and fields in place, load the deals already in motion. Every plan, including Free, imports and exports records as a CSV or Excel file, so an existing pipeline spreadsheet can come in as a batch rather than being retyped deal by deal. Map the spreadsheet’s status column to your new stages as you import, and put a deal in the stage its most recent action actually earned, even if that means several deals land earlier than the spreadsheet suggested.

For anything new, qualifying a lead in Senitix CRM creates the contact, the account and the deal in one step, so a rep working fresh leads never manually re-enters the same company twice.

Step 5: Decide whether you need a second pipeline

Most teams should run one pipeline until a second, genuinely different sales motion shows up (new business versus renewals, or two product lines sold on different cycles with different buyers). A second pipeline that exists only to make one team’s dashboard look tidier usually means the first pipeline’s stages were wrong.

Each pipeline has its own stages, and how many pipelines a workspace can run depends on its plan; the pricing page lists each limit. A second pipeline does not get its own set of enforced rules any more than the first one does; it is a separate sequence of stages for a sales motion that genuinely does not fit the first.

Example: a first pipeline for a furniture dealer in Charlotte, NC

Example: a six-rep commercial office-furniture dealer in Charlotte sells to offices, medical practices and coworking operators, mostly through a site visit and a formal quote. The company and every figure below are illustrative. The team agreed on five stages before opening the software:

In a workspace with quoting turned on, the quote in stage three can be built from the product catalog and logged as a quote linked to the deal, so “quote sent” is a fact the record shows rather than a stage the rep marks from memory.

What mistakes turn a pipeline setup into a rebuild?

• Naming stages after feelings, not facts. “Hot,” “warm” and “think it’s close” cannot be checked by anyone but the rep who wrote them, and they cannot be reported on honestly.
• Building the pipeline before the exit criteria. Stages get renamed within weeks once the team notices what the names were supposed to mean but never agreed on.
• Copying a competitor’s stage list wholesale. A pipeline built around someone else’s sales motion tracks their business, not yours.
• Adding a stage for every internal step. “Sent to legal” and “waiting on procurement” are usually better as a key field or a task on the existing stage than as stages of their own. A pipeline with twelve stages stops being read by anyone.
• Skipping the import and starting from zero. Losing the open deals a team was already working erases exactly the pipeline visibility the new setup was meant to create.

Should you copy an industry’s example pipeline?

Adapt it, don’t copy it. A sector page can show a pipeline shaped around how a manufacturer, a logistics broker or a professional-services firm typically sells, with stages such as a site visit or an RFQ response that a generic list would miss. But no sector’s pipeline arrives set up in your workspace: it is a worked example on the page, built the same way the steps above describe, so treat it as a first draft to run through your own Step 1 exit-criteria checklist rather than the finished answer.

How pipelines work in Senitix CRM

In Senitix CRM, deals move through the stages your team defines, on a list or a Kanban board, each with an amount, a close date, a probability and an owner. Each stage can show guidance text and up to five key fields, so the exit criteria your team wrote down in Step 1 appear on the deal itself; the product shows them and never blocks a move on them. See the full record under deals and pipelines.

You can build the setup above on Free with up to 2 users, no credit card required, or compare plans on the pricing page if more than 2 people will sell from it.

Frequently asked questions

Do exit criteria stop a deal from moving to the next stage?

No. A stage’s guidance text and key fields are shown to the rep, not enforced by the software, so a deal can move forward with a field left blank. The exit criterion is only as strong as the discipline the team agreed to in the checklist: reviewing deals against it in a weekly meeting is what actually makes it stick.

How many stages should a first sales pipeline have?

Five to seven suits most sales with one decision maker, whether you sell to businesses or to consumers. Fewer if your cycle is short and the buyer moves fast; more only when an added stage marks a genuinely different, checkable buyer action rather than an internal task. A pipeline with ten or more stages is usually a sign that internal steps got promoted into stages.

Can two sales teams share one pipeline?

They can, if they sell the same way through the same stages: most companies start here. Split into a second pipeline once the two teams’ sales motions genuinely diverge, such as new business against renewals, rather than splitting by team name alone.

How many pipelines can you create in Senitix CRM?

It depends on the plan, and the pricing page lists each plan’s pipeline limit. Every pipeline has its own stages, guidance text and key fields. A second pipeline is not a separate set of enforced rules; it exists so a genuinely different sales motion, such as renewals versus new business, gets its own sequence of stages to move through.

Should you import old deals or start the new pipeline empty?

Import them. Every plan can import records as a CSV or Excel file, and putting each open deal into the stage its most recent buyer action actually earned gives the team a working pipeline from day one instead of a blank board that hides the deals people are already working.