Do your stages mean anything?
A deal in “Proposal” should mean the same thing no matter which rep owns it. When stages are just folders, your forecast is a guess. Tick the exit criteria you genuinely enforce today and see your stage-gate integrity — then take the generated playbook.
Which exit criteria does a deal truly have to clear?
Tick only the ones a deal cannot skip in your CRM today — not the ones you wish were enforced.
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Your stage exit-criteria playbook
This is what a fully-gated pipeline enforces. Make each one a required field or validation rule at its stage — then “Proposal” means the same thing for every rep, every forecast, and every AI model reading the data.
The catch: —
A stage is a promise. Most pipelines don’t keep it.
Whether your stages carry enforced entry and exit criteria — so a deal’s stage actually predicts its odds — is the heart of Process Standardization, one of six dimensions in the Readiness Index. See how standardized your revenue process really is.