Setting up your sales pipeline

Your assistant already talks to customers — on the phone, on WhatsApp, on your website chat. Most of those conversations are not worth chasing. A few are.

The pipeline is a board that fills itself with the few that are. When a call ends in a way you have said counts as a lead, a card appears on the board with the customer’s name, what they wanted, and where it should start. Nobody types it in. From there your assistant can keep chasing it — sending a WhatsApp message after a quiet week, calling after two — or hand it to you when it needs a person.

It is off until you turn it on, twice. The master switch is off for every new account, and even with it on, a pipeline with no intake rules creates nothing. You cannot accidentally start a board filling up.

Where to find it: open Pipeline in your dashboard, then the Stages & intake button at the top right. If the pipeline has never been switched on you will see a short explainer and a Set up the pipeline button instead of an empty board — that opens the same panel.

Only team members with admin access can open and save this panel.

The five-minute setup

If you want the short version, do these four things and stop:

1. Tick Turn the pipeline on.
2. Click Add an outcome. Type the outcome your assistant records for a real lead (the next section explains how to find yours), and pick New as the column it starts in.
3. Tick Email me when a deal needs a person. Leave the address box empty.
4. Save.

You now have a working board with the seven default columns, no automatic chasing, and an email if something needs you. That is a perfectly good place to live for a few weeks. Follow-ups can wait until you have seen real deals arrive.

Step 1 — Turn the pipeline on

This is the master switch. While it is off nothing is created, no follow-up is ever sent, and the board shows “Your pipeline is switched off”.

Turning it off later does not delete anything. Existing deals stay exactly as they are; the board simply stops adding to them and stops chasing. Tick it back on and everything resumes.

Step 2 — Which enquiries become deals?

This is the part people most often get wrong, so it is worth two minutes.

What an “outcome” is

At the end of every conversation your assistant writes a short summary, and one field in that summary is the outcome — its own words for how the conversation ended. Something like callback_requested or completed_positive.

That vocabulary is yours, not ours. It was set up along with your assistant, and it is different for every business. There is no fixed list we can offer you in a dropdown, which is why this is a free-text box rather than a menu.

⚠️ The faint example inside the box — quote_requested — is an illustration, not a real value. Typing it will almost certainly match nothing. Use your own outcomes.

Finding your outcome values

Open the Calls page and look at recent calls. Each one shows the outcome your assistant recorded. Copy those words exactly.

Do that for a week’s worth of calls and the handful that mean “this is a lead” become obvious — as do the many that mean “this was a wrong number”.

Matching ignores capitals and stray spaces, so Callback Requested and callback_requested both match a rule written either way. It does nothing cleverer than that: callback will not match callback_requested. Copy the whole value.

Filling in a rule

Each row reads as a sentence:

callback_requested starts in New

The left box is the outcome. The right dropdown is the column a new card lands in. That dropdown only offers your ordinary columns — a lead cannot arrive already Won or Lost. Click Add an outcome for another row, or the bin icon to remove one.

An example — a service business

Outcome	Starts in	Why
completed_positive	New	They were interested and got their answer — worth following up
callback_requested	Contacted	They asked to be called back; you have already spoken once
busy_reschedule	Contacted	A real person who wants to talk, just not right now
serious_complaint	New	Not a sale, but it absolutely needs a human

Deliberately not mapped: no_answer, wrong_person, noise_or_unclear, off_task_only. These are the majority of calls and none of them is a lead. An outcome you have not mapped simply creates nothing — silently, and that is correct behaviour rather than an error.

Start with one rule

Map one outcome, the most obviously lead-shaped one, into New. Watch the board for a week. Add more once you can see what is arriving and what is missing.

A board that fills with junk on day one gets abandoned. A board that gains three real deals a week gets used.

What ends up on the card

The card title is built as who — outcome, for example “Priya Sharma — callback_requested”. Another reason to keep outcome names readable: your team reads them all day.

If you leave this empty

The panel will tell you: “With nothing listed here, no deals will be created.” The master switch on its own does nothing. This is the second half of the opt-in.

Chats and WhatsApp work differently

Phone calls use your assistant’s exact vocabulary. WhatsApp and website chat threads have no clean “end of call” moment, so their outcome is a short phrase written freely — it will not reliably match a rule you wrote for a phone-call outcome. Treat calls as the dependable intake source; chat intake is best effort.

Step 3 — Getting told when a deal needs you

Some deals reach a point where your assistant should stop and let a person take over. When that happens the deal is marked Needs you and appears under the board’s Needs you filter.

That filter is somewhere to look. This setting is how it reaches you.

Tick Email me when a deal needs a person and you get one email per deal, as it happens.

Who should we email?

What you type	Who gets it
(leave it empty)	Everyone on your team with admin access — including anyone you add later. Recommended.
sales@yourcompany.com	Just that address
priya@example.com, ravi@example.com	Both. Commas, semicolons, spaces and new lines all separate addresses.

Empty is the recommended setting, not a missing value. The list of admins is worked out at the moment the email is sent, so a new manager you add next month is covered without anyone remembering to edit this box. A typed list goes stale the day someone leaves.

You can list up to 20 addresses, and they do not need to be Kooday users — the email is just an email.

What the email looks like

Subject:  [Kooday] Priya Sharma — callback_requested — Priya Sharma needs you

Priya Sharma — callback_requested — Priya Sharma needs a human.
Stage: Qualified

Customer asked about bulk pricing for 12 vehicles — needs a quote from you.

Open the deal: https://app.kooday.tech/pipeline?deal=…

The middle paragraph is the brief — either what your assistant worked out from the conversation, or the wording you set on the column.

What counts as “needs a person”

Two things, and only these two:

• The Flag to a person after N days rule fired on a quiet deal.
• Your assistant tried a follow-up and it genuinely failed.

Deliberately not flagged: follow-ups your assistant chose to skip (a customer on your do-not-call list, or a deal you snoozed), deals you have already taken over yourself, and closed deals — once something is Won or Lost, any outstanding work on it is moot.

Turning the email off between something being flagged and the email going out stops it. The setting is checked at the moment of sending.

Step 4 — Your columns

The order here is the order on the board. Move a column with the ↑ and ↓ arrows.

What you start with

Column	Worked by
New	Assistant
Contacted	Assistant
Qualified	Assistant
Follow-up	Assistant
Negotiation	You
Won	—
Lost	—

None of them has any follow-up cadence. A fresh board sends nothing, even with the pipeline switched on. Chasing is something you switch on deliberately, per column, in the next step.

Rename any of these to your own vocabulary — Enquiry, Site visit booked, Quote sent, Awaiting deposit. Add more with Add a column; new ones appear before Won and Lost, since nothing comes after Won.

Who works it

Each ordinary column has a dropdown with two choices:

• Assistant works it — your assistant may move deals onward from here and send the follow-ups you configure below.
• You work it — a holding pen. Your assistant never chases from here and never moves a deal on by itself. Deals sit until a person acts.

A common shape is the assistant working the early columns and a human working the last one before Won. That is exactly what the defaults do with Negotiation.

Won and Lost

You can rename these — Booked, No longer interested — but you cannot delete them, and you cannot mix them in among ordinary columns. There must be exactly one of each.

They also cannot carry follow-ups: every deal in them is closed, so a cadence there would never fire.

Deleting a column

The bin icon appears on ordinary columns only, and it can refuse for two reasons:

• “‘Qualified’ still has 4 deals. Move them to another stage before removing it.” — drag those deals elsewhere first.
• “‘Qualified’ can’t be removed: deals have moved through it, and deleting it would erase that history from your funnel. Rename it instead.”

The second is permanent. Once a deal has ever passed through a column, that column can only be renamed, never deleted — removing it would silently rewrite your funnel history. Renaming is almost always what you actually wanted.

Step 5 — Automatic follow-ups

This section is the controls. For when a follow-up actually fires, which channels it can reach, and everything that stops one — including the customer’s own opt-out — see When does your assistant follow up?.

Each ordinary column can carry up to three rules, each measured in quiet days:

Rule	What actually happens
Message after N days	Your assistant sends a WhatsApp message
Call after N days	Your assistant places a phone call
Flag to a person after N days	A to-do appears for you — nothing goes to the customer

The third one changes nothing about the deal and sends the customer nothing. It raises a to-do, marks the deal Needs you, and — if you enabled it in step 3 — emails you.

What “quiet” means

Quiet means nothing has happened on the deal: no call, no message, no stage move, no note. The count runs from the last real activity.

A deal you moved this morning is not quiet. Neither is one your assistant called yesterday. Scheduling a follow-up is not itself activity — which is what lets a 2-day message and a 5-day call both fire on a deal that stays silent.

Rules stack. A deal quiet for six days in a column with a 2-day message and a 5-day call gets both. It is not “the most urgent one wins”.

Every rule needs wording

Beside each day count is a box for what that follow-up should be about. You cannot save one without the other — the panel will ask for the missing half.

A rule with no wording is one your assistant would decline to carry out, silently. Blocking the save is kinder than letting it look configured while doing nothing.

Your wording is the fallback, not the script

Usually your assistant writes its own. When it has just spoken to the customer it already knows what the next contact should be about, and the follow-up carries that rather than a generic nudge.

Your wording covers the deals it has no suggestion for: imported ones, ones you created by hand, calls that suggested nothing.

Write it as a brief, not a script — your assistant phrases the actual message.

• Good: “Check whether they still need the quote, and offer a site visit.”
• Weak: “Hi, just following up!”

A worked example

New — assistant works it

Rule	Days	Wording
Message after	2	Check they got the details and ask when suits them for a visit
Call after	5	Ask what’s holding them up and offer a slot this week
Flag to a person after	10	No response to two attempts — worth a personal call?

Qualified — assistant works it

Rule	Days	Wording
Message after	3	Ask if they’ve had a chance to review the quote
Flag to a person after	7	Quote sent, no reply for a week — discount or drop?

Negotiation — you work it, so no rules at all. A human is on it, and automated chasing would cut across them.

A reasonable starting shape: one message rule in your first column, and one flag-to-a-person rule further along. Add calls once you trust the messages.

Hot and cold

Once a base cadence exists, a second line appears beneath it:

but if hot 2 cold 14 days instead

Your assistant judges each deal as hot, warm or cold from how the conversation went, and you can override that yourself on the deal card. Hot deals are chased on the shorter clock, cold ones on the longer.

Two things are worth knowing:

• This changes when, never whether. No base rule means no follow-up, however hot the deal is. That is why these boxes only appear once you have set the base number.
• Warm and not-yet-judged deals use the base number. A deal your assistant has not formed a view on is not treated as cold.

For example, on New: message after 4 days, but 2 if hot and 10 if cold.

Limits

• Days must be between 1 and 365. Zero is not allowed — a 0-day rule would fire against a deal seconds after it was created.
• The same kind of follow-up will not repeat within 24 hours on the same deal, whatever the rules say.
• Follow-ups run on a regular sweep, so a rule fires shortly after it comes due rather than to the second.

Saving your changes

Save writes three things in order: your columns, then your intake rules, then your email settings.

• Incomplete intake rows are dropped, and the panel tells you so. A row needs both an outcome and a column.
• If something fails, the panel stays open with your work intact, and tells you whether nothing was saved or only part of it — so you know whether to redo everything or just fix one thing.
• Cancel discards everything, including the parts that would have saved fine.

Troubleshooting

No deals are appearing

Work down this list in order:

1. Is Turn the pipeline on ticked?
2. Is there at least one intake rule with both an outcome and a column?
3. Open the Calls page — does the outcome you typed actually match what your assistant recorded? This is the usual culprit. Copy the value character for character.
4. Have any calls happened since you saved? Intake is not retrospective: it runs on new conversations, not on your history.

Deals appear for things that aren’t leads

Remove that outcome’s row. Nothing already created disappears — drag those cards to Lost.

No follow-ups are going out

Check that the column has a cadence and wording, that it is set to Assistant works it, that the deal has not been taken over by a person (a manual deal is never chased), that it is not snoozed, and that it has genuinely been quiet — any activity resets the clock.

Follow-ups feel too aggressive

Raise the day counts, or set a longer cold override rather than removing the rule outright.

I’m not getting the emails

Check the tick box in step 3. If the address box is empty, confirm you actually have admin access. Then check your spam folder for [Kooday].

I can’t delete a column

See Deleting a column — if deals have ever passed through it, rename it instead.

A sensible first configuration

☑ Turn the pipeline on

Which enquiries become deals?
  callback_requested   starts in   New
  completed_positive   starts in   New

☑ Email me when a deal needs a person
  Who should we email?   (empty — everyone with admin access)

Your columns
  New          Assistant works it
                 Message after 3 days
                   "Check they got the details and ask when suits them"
                 Flag to a person after 10 days
                   "No reply in 10 days — worth a personal call?"
  Contacted    Assistant works it     (no follow-ups yet)
  Qualified    Assistant works it     (no follow-ups yet)
  Follow-up    Assistant works it     (no follow-ups yet)
  Negotiation  You work it
  Won
  Lost

Two intake rules, one column doing the chasing, a human on the last column, and an email when something needs you. Expand from there once you have watched real deals move across the board.