Deal stage exit criteria, stage by stage
Write each stage as something the buyer did, then decide which rules to enforce.
The SalesOS team
9 min read
Ask five reps what “Proposal” means and you will get five answers. One sent pricing. One is about to send pricing. One had a good call and wanted the deal to look further along before the forecast meeting. Then everyone acts surprised when the quarter lands thirty percent below the pipeline report.
Exit criteria are the fix, and they are less glamorous than any forecasting model. They are a short, written answer to one question for every stage: what must be true before this deal is allowed to move on?
Why stages stop meaning anything
Stages usually start out well defined. Someone in sales operations writes them up, there is a training session, and for a month the pipeline is honest. Then the definitions live in a slide deck nobody opens, new reps learn the stages by watching old reps, and each stage slowly comes to mean “how I feel about this deal”.
The forecast is only the first casualty. A manager who cannot trust stages has to inspect every deal personally, so pipeline reviews turn into interrogations. Reps learn that the stage field is something done to them, so they update it as late as possible. Conversion rates between stages become meaningless, and with them any chance of knowing where deals really stall.
Write criteria as buyer actions
The most useful rule we know is that an exit criterion should describe something the buyer did, not something the rep did. “Sent proposal” tells you about your own outbox. “Buyer confirmed the proposal reached the person who signs” tells you about the deal.
A good criterion is:
- Observable. Someone other than the rep could check it. A meeting happened, a document came back, a name is on the record.
- Binary. It is true or it is not. “Strong interest” fails this test. “Agreed to a technical review with their IT lead” passes.
- Few. Two or three per stage. A stage with nine criteria will be satisfied by a rep typing “yes” nine times.
A worked example, stage by stage
This is a typical pipeline for a B2B product with a sales cycle of one to three months. Rename the stages to match yours. The criteria are the part worth stealing.
| Stage | Leave this stage when | Record it in |
|---|---|---|
| Qualified | You have spoken with someone who has the problem, and they agreed to a discovery call with a date. | Primary contact, next step |
| Discovery | The buyer described the problem in their own words, the cost of leaving it alone, and who else cares about it. | Needs analysis, amount (a first estimate) |
| Solution | The people who will use it saw it working against their case, and named what would stop them buying. | Proposed solution, competitors |
| Proposal | Pricing reached the person who signs, and they told you the decision process and the date. | Close date, amount |
| Negotiation | Only commercial or legal terms remain, and the buyer has said, in words, that they intend to proceed. | Next step with a date |
Notice what is missing. There is no “sent deck”, “had a great call” or “champion identified”. The last one is tempting, but “champion” is a judgement and judgements drift. “Introduced us to their manager” is the observable version.
Enforce a little, guide the rest
Software can enforce some criteria and not others. It can refuse to move a deal into Proposal without a close date. It cannot know whether the buyer actually said they intend to proceed.
Our advice is to enforce only the fields that are cheap to fill and expensive to be missing: amount, close date, a next step, a primary contact. Everything else should be visible to the rep as a checklist at the moment they move the deal, and reviewed by a manager rather than blocked by the system.
Overdo the enforcement and you get the worst of both worlds. Reps will satisfy a required field with “TBD”, a close date at the end of the quarter, and an amount of one. The record looks complete and says nothing. The tell is a sudden spike in deals whose close date is the last day of the month.
Time in stage is a criterion too
A deal that meets every criterion and then sits in Negotiation for ninety days is not in Negotiation. Give each stage an expected maximum, based on how long your won deals typically spent there, and flag anything that runs past it. You are not punishing the rep. You are asking a useful question at the right time: what changed?
Stalled deals are where forecasts go wrong, and they are rarely flagged by the people closest to them, because hope is a reasonable thing to feel about your own deal.
Rolling it out without a revolt
- Start with the last ten lost deals. For each one, ask which stage it really reached. The gap between that and the stage it was in when it died is your case for doing this at all.
- Write criteria with two or three senior reps, not for them. They know which signals actually predict a close, and they will defend criteria they wrote.
- Turn on enforcement for one stage, usually Proposal, since that is where optimism does the most damage to the forecast. Add more later if it helps.
- Use criteria in pipeline reviews. Replace “how is this deal going?” with “which criterion is missing?”. Reviews get shorter, and reps stop dreading them.
- Revisit after a quarter. Look at conversion between stages. A stage nearly every deal passes through is not filtering anything.
How SalesOS handles it
A pipeline stage in SalesOS can carry two lists. Required fields are enforced: a deal cannot enter the stage until they are filled, and the rep is told exactly which ones are missing. The fields a stage can require are amount, close date, next step, probability, needs analysis, proposed solution, competitors, deal type, source and primary contact. Exit criteria appear on the deal as written guidance and are not enforced, for the reasons above. A stage can also have a maximum number of days, after which the deal is flagged as stalled.
All three are set per stage in Settings, under Pipelines and stages, by anyone with a manager role. The industry packs come with stages and exit criteria already written for their market, and pipelines work on every plan, including the trial. For how pipeline rules fit with the rest of the system, see what a sales operating system is.