Starting a business always seemed like a dark art to me. I assumed there’d be all these complicated processes you’d need to set up, and costly software systems to buy.

Turns out, that’s not strictly true. Actually, when you’re just starting out, it’s better to keep things simple. Tasks all in one place; like ClickUp.

Here I’ll show you how to set up a simple sales pipeline in ClickUp so that you can keep track of what you’re selling to who (and for how much!).

First create a new list for your Sales Pipeline:

Add your deals as ‘tasks’ onto that list

You’ll want to add your deal values in too. Add a column and choose Money:

Pick your currency:

I’ve dragged the new column across next to the deal name, as it’s quite important info for me! Now we can start adding our value info into that new column:

You’ll notice that if you hover at the bottom of the value column, you get the option to calculate the total – that’s pretty handy (not available on free plan).

Next you’ll want to change your statuses, so that you can easily see the status of a deal:

Create custom statuses here:

I’ve used the 3 standard To Do, In Progress and Complete statuses, BUT – you’ll notice I’ve also added 2 statuses in Done.

This is to easily visualise which deals you have won and lost on the list.

Here’s the difference between ‘Done’ statuses and ‘Closed’ statuses:

• When you mark a task as ‘Done’ – it will continue to show on the list with the chosen done status. If it has a due date that has passed, it won’t show as ‘overdue’.

• When you mark a task as ‘Closed’ – it automatically get hidden from your list. It’s ‘closed’, so you don’t need to worry about it any more.

That’s why I’ve added the 2 ‘Done’ statuses here. You’ll probably want to keep an eye on your wins and losses without having to dig about to find them.

By creating these statuses, you’ll also be able to filter your list view on ‘won’ and ‘lost’ so that you can review them separately if you wish.

You can also use the ‘Board’ view on this list to see the deals grouped by status:

Or you can change the view to be grouped by due date (which you can use as your estimated close date)

If you have people helping you out with sales, another benefit of creating your sales pipeline in ClickUp is that you can assign the deals to particular people to own, and add subtasks to each deal to capture next actions.

See – told you it was simple.

A sales pipeline is just a way to keep you on track with nurturing your sales opportunities, and the flexibility of ClickUp gives you a really easy way to do this.