Closing a deal

Flowtly Editorial Team3 min

A deal closes by being dropped, not by being filled in. Below the pipeline board sits a closing strip with two targets — Won and Lost — and each shows how many deals landed there this month.

Won

Drop the card on Won. There is no confirmation step, because an Undo appears immediately afterwards. That is the trade deliberately made: closing is one movement, and the safety net comes after rather than before.

Lost asks why

Dropping on Lost opens one short question — Why was this deal lost? — with a fixed set of reasons:

  • Price too high
  • Chose a competitor
  • No budget
  • Bad timing
  • No response
  • Other

A free-text note is optional beside it. The list is fixed on purpose: a reason you can count is worth more later than a sentence everyone phrases differently.

Where a closed deal goes

It leaves the Pipeline board, which only ever shows open deals, and lives in the List tab instead — that view includes everything won and lost. Filter by status to find it.

Reopening does not restore the stage

A closed deal can be reopened from its own panel. It returns to the first stage of the pipeline, not the stage it was in when it closed.

That is worth knowing before you reopen something that had reached late-stage negotiation: the deal comes back, its history is intact, but its position on the board does not survive the round trip. Move it forward again manually.

Example use cases

  • Close a deal the moment the customer says yes, without leaving the board.
  • Undo a drop you made on the wrong card, immediately, without an admin.
  • Record that a deal went to a competitor, so the pattern is countable at quarter end.
  • Find last month's lost deals and read the notes behind the reasons.
  • Reopen a deal that came back to life, knowing you will need to move it up the board yourself.

Connection map

Part ofDerived fromRefers to
Documented hereDocumented elsewhere
lead-list contains lead. lead-activity logged against lead. lead converts to deal. lead becomes counterparty. deal sold to counterparty. deal sits in pipeline-stage. deal closed with lost-reason.containslogged againstconverts tobecomessold tosits inclosed withPProspect list — A finite group of companies to work through. It tracks how many are done against the total, so the work has an end.Prospect listPProspect — A company you are working but that is not a customer yet. It sits at New, Contacted or Qualified, and everything done to it is logged against it.ProspectAActivity — One recorded contact with a prospect — a call, a message, a reply, a bounce, a meeting — attributed to a channel.ActivityDDeal — A sale in progress: a customer, an amount, and the stage it has reached. It cannot exist without a customer, and its stage is never blank.DealCCounterparty — The other side of a financial document — a client billed, or a supplier owed.CounterpartySStage — A step in the pipeline, carrying a probability. That probability is what weights the pipeline total — which is a measure of quality, not a forecast.StageLLost reason — Why a deal was lost, chosen from a fixed list so the answer can be counted later rather than re-read.Lost reason

Related terms