Opportunity Stage

An Opportunity Stage is a defined phase within the sales process — such as Qualification, Discovery, Demo, Proposal, Negotiation, or Closed — that indicates where a specific deal currently sits in its progression toward closure. Stage definitions encode the company's sales methodology: each stage should have clear entry criteria (what must be true to classify an opportunity at this stage?), exit criteria (what must be achieved to advance to the next stage?), and probability weighting used in forecast calculations. The reliability of stage data in a CRM depends entirely on how clearly these criteria are defined and how consistently managers enforce them during pipeline reviews — ambiguous or loosely enforced stages produce pipeline reports that bear little relationship to actual deal status.