In this article we explain how to adapt the sales pipeline to the way your agency works: renaming the stages, changing their colour and their order, creating new ones and deleting the ones you do not use.

The five stages you start with — New, Contacted, Proposal, Won and Lost — are only a starting point. If your sales process has an intermediate step, like waiting for a supplier to reply, you can add it.

You will find the configuration on the Opportunities board, in the settings icon next to New opportunity.

Click the stage's edit icon. Edit column opens, with three fields: the title, the colour and a description.

You have five preset colours and the Custom option, which opens a picker to choose any colour by its hex code.

The description is optional and is there to make clear what that stage means — "the client has been contacted and is reviewing the proposal". It is useful above all if there are several of you on the team and you want everybody to move opportunities by the same criteria.

One detail about the names: the five initial stages are shown translated into each agent's language. As soon as you rename one, it keeps the text you give it and the whole team sees it the same way.

Drag the stages by the dots icon, to the left of each one. The order in the panel is the order of the columns on the board.

The eye icon hides a stage without deleting it. It stops appearing as a column on the board, but you lose nothing: the opportunities it holds are still there, and they reappear when you show it again.

It is the prudent option when you are not sure a stage is useful to you. Try it hidden before deleting it.

Click Add stage at the foot of the panel. All you need is a title and a colour; it goes to the end and then you drag it into place.

The bin icon deletes it, and asks you to confirm first.

If the stage has opportunities in it, they are not lost. When you confirm, the confirmation itself changes and shows you "This stage has N opportunities. Choose where to move them" with a dropdown to pick the destination stage. Until you choose, the Delete button stays disabled: the stage is not deleted without you deciding where its opportunities go.

These two stages are special: you can rename them and change their colour, but not hide, move or delete them. You will see a padlock instead of the drag icon.

The reason is that MOGU needs to know which one is the successful close and which one the close without a sale, in order to work out the total in pipeline, which only counts open opportunities.

You can call them whatever you like — "Booked" and "Discarded", for example — and they will go on playing that part.