Pipelines & Deals
Build a visual sales pipeline, track deal progress, and forecast revenue with BANT qualification.
Understanding Pipelines
A pipeline represents your sales process as a series of ordered stages. Each deal moves through these stages from first contact to close, giving your team a visual overview of where every opportunity stands.
Rally supports multiple pipelines, so you can create separate processes for different products, regions, or sales motions. For example, you might have one pipeline for new business and another for renewals.
Pro Tip
Start with a single pipeline and add more only when your sales processes are meaningfully different. Too many pipelines too early makes reporting harder.
Default Pipeline Stages
Every new Rally workspace comes with a default pipeline that covers the most common B2B sales process:
| Stage | Probability | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Lead | 10% | Initial interest expressed, not yet qualified |
| Qualified | 25% | Budget, need, and decision-maker confirmed |
| Proposal | 50% | Proposal or quote sent to the prospect |
| Negotiation | 75% | Terms being discussed, contract in review |
| Closed Won | 100% | Deal signed and revenue booked |
| Closed Lost | 0% | Deal lost or prospect disqualified |
Customizing Your Pipeline
Navigate to Settings → Pipelines to customize your sales process. You can:
- Add, remove, or rename stages
- Set probability percentages on each stage for weighted forecasting
- Reorder stages via drag-and-drop
- Create entirely new pipelines for different sales processes
Pro Tip
Keep your pipeline under 8 stages. Too many stages slow down your team and make it harder to identify where deals get stuck. If a stage rarely has deals in it, consider merging it with an adjacent stage.
Creating & Managing Deals
Create a deal by clicking "New Deal" from the pipeline view or from a contact's record. Every deal can be associated with a contact and/or a company.
Deal Properties
- Deal name — a short description of the opportunity
- Value — the monetary value and currency
- Expected close date — when you expect the deal to close
- Stage — current position in the pipeline
- Owner — the team member responsible for the deal
Move deals through stages by dragging them in the pipeline board view, or by updating the stage field on the deal record.
BANT Qualification
Rally includes built-in BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) qualification scoring to help your team objectively assess deal readiness.
| Criteria | What to Capture |
|---|---|
| Budget | Confirmed budget amount the prospect has allocated |
| Authority | Whether your contact is the decision maker or an influencer |
| Need | Identified need and urgency level (critical, high, medium, low) |
| Timeline | Target decision date or implementation deadline |
Each BANT criteria contributes to a qualification score from 0 to 100. Deals scoring 75 or above are considered "qualified" and ready for active pursuit.
Pro Tip
Use the BANT score to set a qualification gate in your pipeline. Create a workflow that prevents deals from moving past the "Qualified" stage until their BANT score reaches 75.
Deal Forecasting
Rally calculates a weighted pipeline value for every deal by multiplying the deal value by the stage probability. This gives you a realistic view of expected revenue.
Example: A $50,000 deal in the "Proposal" stage (50% probability) has a weighted value of $25,000. The dashboard sums all weighted values to show your total forecasted revenue.
The dashboard displays forecasted revenue alongside actual closed revenue, giving you and your leadership team confidence in the pipeline's health.
Deal History
Every stage change is logged with a timestamp and the user who made the change. Open any deal to see its full movement history through the pipeline.
Use deal history to analyze how long deals spend in each stage, identify bottlenecks, and coach your team on moving opportunities forward faster.