How to build your funnel

A board is only as useful as its columns. These are the choices worth making before you start dragging contacts around.

Stages are what happens, not what you hope

A good column is a state you can look at a contact and know they are in. "Quote sent" is a state; "interested" is a guess. If two people on your team would put the same contact in different columns, the columns are not defined tightly enough.

Examples by kind of business

Selling a product — New contact · Quote sent · Negotiating · Closed

A service by appointment — Enquiry · Appointment booked · Attended · Follow-up

A shop with delivery — Order taken · Paid · Shipped · Delivered

Support — Received · In progress · Waiting on the customer · Resolved

Take whichever is closest and rename it in your own words. The words your team already uses out loud are better than the ones above.

How many columns

Between four and six. Below four the board says little more than a list; above six it stops fitting on screen and people stop moving cards, which is worse than not having a board.

If you find yourself wanting eight, two of them are usually the same stage seen from different angles.

One board, or several

Have a second board when the process is different, not when the product is:

• One board per process — sales on one, after-sales support on another. Worth it: the stages genuinely differ.
• One board per campaign — a seasonal push kept apart from the everyday pipeline. Worth it while the campaign runs.
• One board per salesperson — not worth it. Each person already sees the conversations they are responsible for, and the responsible users are set on the conversation, not on the board.

A contact can be on more than one board at a time, so a customer can be in after-sales while also sitting in a campaign.

The last column

The rightmost column is treated as the finished one: the board draws it in green and hides its cards until you choose View cards in its menu, so the stages you are still working stay readable. You do not mark it anywhere — it is simply the one furthest right, so reordering the columns changes which one that is. Put the stage you consider "done" at the end.

Cards do not start there. Add chat puts new cards in the first column that is not the last one, and the conversation cannot create a card in the last column or move one into it. A card gets there when somebody drags it onto that column on the board, or moves a whole column's cards there with Move cards to another Kanban. So a board needs at least two columns before you can add contacts to it.

Starting

Create the board first, then its columns — a new board has none — then bring the contacts in. See Funnels and Kanban boards for where each of those lives, and Work your board day to day once it has contacts on it.

Do not spend an afternoon on this. Four columns, contacts in, and adjust in a week when you can see where they pile up.