Now that you've created your Pipeline, let's get on the Overview and Stages tab of your Pipeline so you can get this started! 

Overview Tab

The overview tab of Pipelines will give you an overview of the success of your Pipeline. 

Note: this tab will be useful once your Pipeline is activated and you have contacts on your Pipeline. 

Updates

The updates will give you the number of contacts that are on your pipeline and the completion rate. 

The completion rate will be a percentage based on the number of contacts that are the last stage of your Pipeline.

Pipeline Progress

The pipeline progress will let you know how much money has been associated to your Pipeline based on your monetary goal.

Note: if there is no monetary goal for your Pipeline, the Pipeline Progress will be empty. 

Stages

Setting up the stages is going to be the crucial part in creating your timeline. The stages are going to determine what you'll be using your Pipeline for. 

Once you are on Stages, you can add your stages:

This is where you go ahead and add Stages to your Pipeline:

Your Pipeline needs to have at least 3 stages and a maximum of 10 stages. You have the complete control of naming your stages as we wanted to make sure that Pipeline is customizable and useful for you! 

Note: Stages need to have a name. You are not able to save your stages with no stage names. If you do not want to add names, you can mimic what I did on the image above and calling the stages: Stage 1, Stage 2, etc. 

Add Probability

This is an optional field on the creating stages page. Adding probability will give you the ability to add the percentage of a contact completing the purpose of the specific stage of the pipeline. You can adjust the percentage on each stage as each stage can have a different probability.

Adding Contacts to your Pipeline

Now that you've set up the stages, I'm sure you are very eager to start adding contacts to your stages! 

There's two ways that you can add contacts to your Pipeline:

Through the Pipeline Stages Tab

You can add contacts in here by clicking on Add Contacts:

You will select the contact from the dropdown, select the stage and the specific ask amount for those contacts. 

Note: adding an ask amount is an optional field as you might not have a monetary goal for your Pipeline. 

Through the Contacts Tool

The second way (and most efficient if you are looking to bulk add contacts to your pipeline) is by selecting contacts through the contacts tool and then bulk adding them to the Pipeline:

Note: this will be really helpful if you have a certain set of filters for the contacts that you want to add to your Pipeline. You can filter by those contacts and select them all and then add them to the Pipeline in bulk!

Note 2: If you add contacts this way through the Contacts tool, you will not be able to add an ask amount for the contacts on the Pipeline.

What's Next?

Now that your Stages are set up and that you've added contacts to your stage, we are going to be moving to my favourite part of Pipelines: Setting up the Rules! 

You can learn more about setting up the rules here: Pipeline Rules.