Pipelines are data, not fixed design. Two are seeded for every company:
- Sales pipeline — Qualification → Discovery → Proposal → Negotiation → Won / Lost.
- Donor cultivation — Identified → Engaged → Asked → Committed, for charities working a donor towards their first gift.
Every stage carries a probability — the declared chance of winning from that stage. It is set once, on the stage, and it weights the pipeline's value everywhere the figure is read; it is never typed per opportunity, so two people reading the pipeline always read the same weighted number.
Rename stages, reorder them, change probabilities, deactivate a pipeline, or define a pipeline of your own — resellers, grants, memberships. Shaping pipelines is setup work, so it sits behind its own permission, Manage CRM pipelines (§17.6).