Sales pipeline chart and pipeline phases

What it does

The sales pipeline chart shows the value of open opportunities grouped by pipeline phase, so a manager can see where the money is sitting. The phases are not a field somebody types into — they come from the stage categories on the business process flow attached to the Opportunity table.

Key facts

Pipeline phase is derived, and its value is formatted as {StageCategoryIndex} - {CategoryName} — for example 1 - Qualify. The number is there so the phases sort in process order rather than alphabetically.
The category comes from the Category property set on each BPF stage in the process designer. Change a stage's category and the pipeline phase for every deal on that stage changes with it.
Colour in the chart is driven by the category, not by the stage name. Two stages sharing a category collapse into one phase in the chart.
Only stages associated with the Opportunity table are charted. On a multi-table process, phases belonging to Lead, Quote or Order simply don't appear, and the chart looks truncated.
The chart is out of the box in both Sales Hub and Sales Professional and needs no additional licence.
It aggregates opportunity revenue, so it inherits whatever estimated revenue discipline the client has — or doesn't have.
The same phase logic feeds the funnel chart in the opportunity pipeline view, so fixing categories fixes both at once.
There's no configuration surface for the chart itself beyond the standard chart designer; the meaningful configuration is upstream in the BPF stage categories.

When to use / skip

Use it as the default answer when a client asks for a pipeline-by-stage visual. It's free, it's consistent with the process bar the sellers see, and it costs nothing to put on a dashboard.

It stops being enough fairly quickly. It gives you value by phase and nothing else — no weighting by probability, no comparison to target, no movement over time. The moment the client asks "how does this compare to last month" or "what's the weighted number", you're into forecasting or a Power BI model, and the chart becomes a seller-level glance rather than a management report.

Skip it entirely if the client's stage categories are a mess and nobody will own fixing them. A chart with four phases named after three different vocabularies is worse than no chart, because people argue about the picture instead of the pipeline.

Configuration decisions

Which stage categories map to which stages. This is the whole configuration, and it needs deciding at BPF design time.
Whether two stages should share a category deliberately — collapsing "Propose" and "Negotiate" into one phase makes the chart cleaner but loses granularity.
Whether the client's reporting vocabulary matches the stage names, and which one changes if not.
Where the chart lives: personal dashboard, team dashboard, or embedded in the pipeline view experience.
Whether estimated revenue or a custom currency column is the number the client actually manages by, since the chart uses opportunity revenue.
Whether the same phase breakdown needs to be available downstream in Power BI, in which case the category mapping needs documenting for the data model.

Gotchas

Recategorising stages after go-live silently re-labels historical deals' phase. Nobody gets a warning and the previous month's screenshot no longer matches.
Stage category index drives sort order, so an unhelpful category assignment produces a chart with phases in the wrong sequence and everyone assumes the chart is broken.
Multi-table processes make the chart look like stages are missing. They aren't missing, they're just not on Opportunity — but expect to explain this more than once.
The chart shows revenue, not deal count. Clients who manage by volume rather than value read it wrongly on first sight.
Opportunities with no active process instance don't have a phase and quietly fall out of the chart. On migrated data this can be a large number.
Changing a stage name without changing its category does nothing to the chart, which confuses people who expected the rename to show up.

Consultant notes

Set stage categories properly during the BPF build. It takes minutes then and is a data-affecting change later.
When you demo the chart, show it next to the process bar so the client sees the connection. Half the value is the client understanding that phase and stage are the same thing.
Check migrated opportunities have process instances before go-live, otherwise the first pipeline review shows a chart missing most of the book.
If the client wants weighted pipeline or trend, say plainly that this chart won't do it and point them at forecasting or Power BI rather than trying to bend the chart.
Agree with the client whether they manage pipeline by value or count, and put both a value chart and a count chart on the dashboard if there's any doubt.

Worth another look if the client redesigns their sales stages, since the categories behind this chart are the thing everyone forgets to update.