The three pipelines
Lead
Winning new work. A six-stage path from first contact to closed.
Engagement
Running active work. A five-stage view of a live client relationship.
Nurture
Staying warm. A three-stage track for contacts that are not active now but matter later.
How they connect
The pipelines are not silos. When a Lead is won, it does not just change a status. It sprouts the records you need to actually operate: a Contact, a Company, and an Engagement. The thing you were selling becomes the thing you are running, with no re-entry and no dropped context. This is the same conversion shape a mature sales system uses, applied to a practice where the sale is the beginning of the real work rather than the end of it.Why this matters for an operator
Your relationships do not sort cleanly into “prospect” or “client.” Someone is a closed engagement, a past client worth nurturing, and a source of referrals all at once. The three-pipeline model holds those states without flattening them, and the Areas spine ties a person’s record across every pipeline they touch.The channel and partner relationships that grow a practice get their own lifecycle on the roadmap, so a referral source is tracked as what it is rather than jammed into the sales pipeline.