Managing Your Deals

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After this lesson you'll know how a deal moves, the difference between its stage and its bid status, and how to keep both honest so everyone's numbers stay right.

This is the lesson that decides whether the company's win/loss numbers mean anything. Every forecast conversation, every win-rate review, every "why did we lose that one" retro is built on the two status fields you are about to master. Get them right as a habit and the reporting takes care of itself. Get them wrong and someone upstream makes a decision on a pipeline that does not exist.

Stage vs. bid status — two different things

Every opportunity carries two trackers, and they answer different questions:

• Stage — where the deal is in your sales process: New → Screening → Meeting → Proposal → Customer.
• Bid Status — the bid outcome specifically: RFP Received → Scoping → Bid Submitted → Shortlisted → Won / Lost / No Bid.

Together they give a complete read — a deal can be mid-process and already submitted on the bid side. In day-to-day practice, the team reads bid status first; it is what the Bid Tracker board and the win/loss reporting run on. But keep both current: stage tells the relationship story, bid status tells the bid story, and different people rely on each.

Moving a deal forward

1. Open the opportunity.
2. Update the Stage as it progresses.
3. Update bid status as the RFP side moves.
4. Leave a one-line note when something meaningful changed — the next person to open the deal should not have to call you.

Note that one transition happens automatically: when a proposal PDF is generated in the Proposal Engine, the deal's bid status moves to Bid Submitted on its own, and the PDF attaches to the deal. That is Universal CRM Push recording real work — do not "correct" it backward.

Marking won, lost, or no-bid

When a deal lands — or doesn't — set it straight away:

• Won → set bid status to Won and fill in the close details, including the Completion / Contract End Date. The platform enforces this one: a win without a completion date gets reverted and you get a notification explaining why. Fill in the date, then set Won again.
• Lost or No Bid → set the status the day you know, so the pipeline stays honest and win/loss reporting is accurate. If you know why you lost, put it in a note — that is the raw material for every future win-rate conversation.

It takes a second and it keeps everyone's forecast real. A pipeline full of stale "open" deals helps no one — and it quietly inflates the number leadership plans against.

Probability

Probability is a rough read on how likely a deal is to land, on a 0–100 scale. It weights the forecast and lets leadership filter to the deals most likely to close. Nudge it up or down as your confidence changes, and leave the reason in a note — "probability moved to 70 after the site visit went well" is worth more than the number alone. The discipline is honesty, not optimism: an inflated probability does not make a deal more likely to close, it just makes the forecast wrong in your name.

Handing a deal off

Update who's responsible on the opportunity and leave a note with the context: where the deal stands, what was promised, what the next step is and when. Because everything lives on the record — documents, estimates, timeline, contacts — the next person walks in with the full picture. Nothing gets lost in a hallway conversation or a buried email. A good handoff note takes ninety seconds and saves the receiver a week of reconstruction.

What good looks like

Before you move on, the quality bar for deal management:

Now you try →

Open one of your deals, check its stage and bid status are both current, and set its probability to where you honestly think it stands.

👉 Open the CRM

Related lessons:

• Your Pipeline — the views where these status changes show up.
• Proposals & Due Dates — the deadline side of the same records.
• Reading Your Dashboard — where honest statuses turn into credible numbers.