While the stages you ultimately use to build your sales pipeline may vary, the most common stages are:
Prospecting
Qualification
Proposal
Negotiation
Opportunity Won/Lost
Post-Purchase
Some companies consolidate this into fewer steps (such as combining proposal and negotiation). Others elongate this pipeline, especially if they have a longer selling cycle.
You’ll need to make adjustments to your pipeline based on your business and your sales process.
Ideally, you don’t want too many things happening at once inside a given stage. You also won’t want to have so many stages that reps spend more time managing the pipeline than pursuing deals.