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Most pipelines are a version of six: new, qualified, discovery, proposal, negotiation, won. The names move around and the count moves with them.
What does not move is the test. Every stage should describe something the buyer has done. A stage that describes what the seller has done — "proposal sent", "followed up" — records activity, and activity is not progress.
Qualified means a named budget holder has agreed the problem is worth money. Discovery means you have seen the thing you are replacing. Proposal means a price is in writing. Negotiation means they are arguing about terms rather than about whether.
Write the entry criterion next to the stage. A stage without one is a label, and labels get applied by mood.
Five or six for most teams. The test is whether somebody can tell two adjacent stages apart without asking. If they cannot, the pair is really one stage and the difference between them is being guessed.
Yes. Flow runs multiple named pipelines, each with its own stages and weights, against the same customer record — so a services deal and a licence deal do not have to pretend to be the same shape.
A stage is where the deal has reached in the sale. A status is whether it is still live: open, lost, dormant. Mixing them puts "lost" in the middle of a pipeline and breaks every conversion rate measured after it.
Half an hour with your own data usually saves reading three of these. The guides will still be here afterwards.