The left column holds the deal's own facts. Not who it is with, not what has happened, just what is true about this piece of business.
It is the smallest of the three panels and the one that decides your reporting.
Deal properties
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Stage | Where it is in your pipeline |
| Amount | What it is worth |
| Expected | The weighted value, from the stage |
| Close date | When you expect it to land |
| Owner | One person, accountable |
| Deal team | Everybody else involved |
| Source | Where it came from |
| Campaign | Which campaign, if any |
| Created | When it was raised |
Below those sit your own custom fields, and the next task.
The four that matter
Everything on a pipeline report is built from four fields, and if these are wrong the report is wrong no matter how good the rest of the record is.
Stage. It drives the weighting, so it drives the forecast. A deal parked two stages ahead of reality does more damage than a deal nobody updated at all, because it inflates the number quietly.
Amount. The real number, not the hopeful one. If it is genuinely unknown, leave it and say so rather than putting in a placeholder that becomes a forecast.
Close date. The date you actually expect, not the end of the quarter. A pipeline where every deal closes on the last day of the month is one nobody believes, and everybody can tell at a glance.
Owner. One person. A deal owned by a team is a deal owned by nobody.
Expected is calculated, not typed
Worth knowing because it confuses people the first time.
The expected value comes from the amount and the stage's weighting. You do not set it, and you cannot override it on the deal.
Which means moving the stage changes your forecast immediately. That is the intended behaviour and the reason stage discipline matters more than any other habit in Sales. If the weightings themselves are wrong, that is a pipeline settings conversation, not something to work around per deal.
Owner against deal team
Two fields that look similar and are not.
The owner is singular and accountable. One name, and it is the name that appears on every pipeline report. Changing it is a handover, not an administrative tidy-up, and it should come with a conversation.
The deal team is everybody else who needs visibility. The person who will deliver it, the finance contact, whoever is covering next week.
The common mistake is putting the manager as owner because they are senior. It makes the report meaningless: a pipeline where a sales director owns forty deals tells you nothing about who is working what.
Editing in place
Name, amount and close date are edited where they sit. Click, change, save.
There is no separate edit mode and no form, which is deliberate: a record you have to open a dialog to correct is a record that stays wrong.
Correct things as you notice them. The five seconds it takes is the whole reason the data stays usable.
Source and campaign
The two fields everybody skips and marketing needs.
Source is how this came to you. Without it, nobody can answer which channels produce business, and the answer defaults to whoever argues most confidently.
Campaign connects the deal to the marketing that produced it, which is what makes campaign attribution real rather than assumed.
Both take a second at creation and cannot be reconstructed later. A deal from eight months ago with no source is permanently unattributable.
Deal team
The owner is accountable. The deal team is everybody else who should see it and be kept in the loop.
Add people who are genuinely working it, not everybody interested. A deal team of nine is a notification list, and the people on it stop reading.
The next task
The panel shows what is next on this deal.
Empty is a warning. A deal with no next task is a deal nothing is scheduled to happen on, which is the most reliable predictor of a deal that goes quiet. Whatever the stage says, that is a deal at rest.
Set the next step before you leave the record. Every time. It is the single habit that separates a pipeline that moves from one that is reviewed.
Logging from here
The panel offers the activity types directly, and choosing one drops you into the timeline ready to write.
Log from here rather than scrolling. It is two clicks from anywhere on the record and it puts the entry in the right place, which is covered in The deal timeline.
Collapsing it
The panel closes. So does the right rail.
Close it when you are working the conversation and want the timeline full width. Open it when you are updating the deal.
Most people leave both open and never discover the record is considerably more comfortable with one closed.
Custom fields
Below the standard properties sit whatever your organisation tracks that the standard record does not.
Few, and filterable. Every custom field appears on every deal forever, and a panel with fourteen extra fields is one people scroll past rather than fill in. The test is whether anybody will filter or report on it; if not, it belongs in a note.
They are added in Custom fields, not here.
Reading the panel on somebody else's deal
Four things, in this order, and it takes about ten seconds.
The close date. In the past means nobody is maintaining this.
The stage against the last activity. A late-stage deal with nothing logged in a month is not late stage.
The owner. Somebody who left is a deal nobody owns.
The next task. Empty means nothing is scheduled.
Any two of those together is a deal worth asking about.
Two habits
Update the stage the day it changes. Not at the review. A pipeline corrected the night before a forecast meeting is a pipeline that was wrong for three weeks.
Move the close date rather than letting it pass. A deal with a date in the past is invisible in every forward-looking report and still counts as open, which is the worst of both.
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