A great sales process has very specific goals for each stage. Progress should be less about your team’s gut, and more about verifiable evidence from your lead. Nutshell admins can configure stage goals in the Sales automation page in your company settings. Stage goals are available to all customers with Nutshell Growth and above.

When the stage goal is met, all tasks will be marked as “skipped” and the lead will advance.

Stage goals are set up inside your pipeline stages. To add or edit stages goals, click Edit next to your pipeline.

Click the + box in the Stage goals section below the relevant stage.

There are different categories of goals that you can choose from to automate your lead’s transitions through the pipeline stages.

Collecting the right contact information is critical to making a sale—you need to know who you’re selling to! Gathering a name, email, and/or phone number can automatically move the lead to the next stage.

Check the boxes next to one or more of the required contact information. Selecting multiple options will make them all required to progress the lead.

A lead receives its value once a product is attached. Click here to learn more about adding value to leads.

To establish a goal based on the lead’s value, enter the amount that a lead should be worth in order to move it to the following stage.

For example, you can choose to automatically advance the lead to the next stage if the value is greater than $0 if you want the lead to move on once any product is identified, or you could choose to move the lead to a higher-cost stage that requires more resources once it's surpassed a particular expected value.

One of the hardest parts of moving a prospect to a valid business opportunity is getting them to talk to you in the first place! If it's a measure of success to get a call or meeting scheduled on the books, use this goal to push the lead to a subsequent stage.

You can click here to add custom types of activities that are meaningful to how your team does business.

If there are several types that meet the stage goal, you can add multiple activity types that will move the lead to the next stage. When multiple activity types are listed in the same stage goal, the lead will automatically advance when any of the chosen types are logged.

While many sales are relationship-driven, those relationships are built through a series of activities. While working towards a sale, your team is making calls, firing off emails, holding demos, and more. These activities are an important part of your pipeline and you can tell Nutshell to automatically progress the lead if a specific activity type has been logged.

Choose an activity type from the dropdown:

If the outreach is your goal, choose this goal type to advance a lead when they have received an email from your team. To use this goal, make sure that emails are being sent from Nutshell, synced into Nutshell, or sent to bcc@nutshell.com.

If you are sending emails from within Nutshell and including hyperlinks (maybe you have a PDF to download, or an online scheduling tool to book meetings), you can automatically progress your lead to the next stage after they have clicked the link in your email. Note that this goal is met when any link in the email is clicked (if you have more than one).

Nutshell can automatically detect if you have received an email from a lead, and advance the lead to a new stage. To use this feature, make sure your emails are coming into Nutshell from our email sync tools or via bcc@nutshell.com!

Your process is as unique as your customers, so Nutshell provides the option to decide exactly what you need to know about a lead to move them closer to winning a sale. Collecting information in any lead custom field can automatically advance the lead to the next stage. You can also choose from the following built-in lead fields:

You can also create new lead custom fields on the fly while you're designing your automated pipeline. Say learning the lead's budget is critical to qualifying them. Add it to your stage goal:

To remove a goal from a stage, click Delete in the stage goal editing window.