Stale opportunities are deals or projects that have stopped moving. Review them regularly so your team can follow up, move stages, close lost, or remove noise from the pipeline.

What this guide helps you do

• Filter the pipeline to stale, overdue, high-value, or closing-soon work.
• Review each opportunity with customer context.
• Create tasks or stage updates after review.

Before you start

• Know what stale means for your sales or service cycle.
• Make sure close dates, values, stages, and owners are current.
• Review customer activity before changing opportunity status.

Do it manually

1. Open Customers and choose Pipeline.
2. Use deal focus filters such as Stale, Overdue, Closing soon, or High value.
3. Open a stale opportunity and review the related customer record.
4. Check recent notes, tasks, emails, invoices, bookings, and form activity.
5. Create a follow-up task, move the opportunity to the right stage, or close it when appropriate.
6. Repeat for selected opportunities and clear filters when finished.

Ask Faster AI

• Find stale opportunities and rank them by value, close date, and recent activity.
• Review this stale deal and suggest whether to follow up, move stage, or close lost.
• Create follow-up tasks for stale opportunities owned by me, but show me the list first.

Review before saving or applying

• Do not close or move an opportunity without checking recent customer activity.
• Review selected deals before applying bulk stage changes.
• Use owner and close-date context before assigning work.

Common issues and fixes

• If too many deals are stale, narrow by owner, value, or close date.
• If a deal is stale because no task exists, create the next follow-up task.
• If the stage is wrong, move it after confirming the customer context.

Quote follow-up playbook

For how stale quote and invoice follow-up can be reviewed as part of pipeline hygiene, read the quote follow-up article. The Follow-Up Playbook: Turning Quotes into Paid Invoices.

Consultant client machine

For the fifteen-minute Friday review pattern that turns stale opportunities into follow-up, stage changes, or closed-lost decisions, read the consultant client machine article. The Consultant's Client Machine: From Inquiry to Retainer.

Connected workflows

• Create a marketing campaign
• Start a chat from Workspace
• Review revenue and pay-now activity

Placeholder media

• Screenshot placeholder: add an annotated screenshot of review stale opportunities with customer names, emails, phone numbers, amounts, file names, and private notes blurred.
• Video placeholder: add a short walkthrough that starts in Customers, shows the manual path, then shows how to ask Faster AI and review the result before saving, sending, merging, or assigning work.

Related help

• Track opportunities and pipeline work
• Set pipeline stages and owners
• Create customer tasks and reminders