Deals & pipeline

For: Sellers · Cypress Managers

A deal is a conversation with a named outcome. Cypress runs two kinds, and keeping them apart is what makes the pipeline readable:

A deal is linked to a business, a contact, or both — a company you are selling to, and the person you are actually talking to. Filters run per kind, or All with a category badge on every card.

The board

Stages run left to right, in the Cypress palette, and a deal is dragged between them. Closing one asks the question the stage cannot answer by itself: what did it convert into? An onboarding deal that reaches WON stamps the organisation link; a vehicle-sale deal that reaches WON records what sold.

Losing a deal asks why, from a short list plus free text, because "lost" without a reason teaches nobody anything.

Every card carries its worth, its stage, its category badge, the people on it, and links straight through to the car, the promotion, the company or the contact it is about.

Temperature

Each deal shows HOT / WARM / COLD, computed rather than typed:

• An offer in the last 14 days is hot — money is on the table.
• Talking within 7 days and a stage that moved within 14 is hot.
• Quiet for more than 21 days is cold.
• Quiet for more than 14 with no next task is cold — nothing is scheduled to change that.

Won and lost deals have no temperature; they are finished. The badge carries the reason and the days quiet, so it can be argued with.

Contacts on a deal

A deal has one primary contact and any number of others. The Connections tab holds them, with the full history of what has passed with each — because "log a call" on a deal has to ask with whom, and a deal with three people on it has three different conversations running.

Vehicles and promotions

Add vehicles individually, or attach a promotion and bring its whole list — a vehicle group, which is what a curated promotion already is. The picker filters to inventory you actually own; anything outside your reach is refused by name rather than silently dropped.

From the vehicle's side

Open a vehicle in Fleet and its Leads tab reads the same deals from the car's side, under Leads on this vehicle. A roll-up shows Leads, Open, Won and Conversion, so three open leads on a truck do not hide behind a board you have not opened. Each lead below it shows who is chasing, the deal's stage, what is asked on this car (not the deal total) and when it last moved; See on board opens the board filtered to this vehicle. Under the leads, Who might want it lists accounts whose history says they would, each with its reasons.

Above the roll-up, when at least two dealers plan to buy vehicles like this one, a violet Planned demand card says how many, as a count and never a name: "2 dealers plan to buy 5 like this in the next 4 weeks." It is the same card as in the Seller Hub; it comes from dealers' buy plans, not from your leads, and it never touches the list of accounts below it. See Planning inside remarketing.

Deals that arrive on their own

Not every deal is created by hand. An offer on one of your vehicles that matches no existing deal adopts itself into your book: a contact is resolved by email (created as a prospect if new), a deal opens at OFFER_IN carrying the vehicle and the offer, and — when the offer came through a campaign — the campaign and promotion that sourced it ride along, so attribution survives to Sold.

This includes express offers — offers made from a public page with nothing but a name and an email. The lead need not have an account for the deal to exist; the deal is how you work the lead. One mailbox and one vehicle make one negotiation: repeat offers land on the deal that already exists rather than stacking duplicates. When the lead later registers, the contact converts and the deal follows the person.

An offer that does match an open deal — same buyer, same vehicle — attaches to it instead, moving the deal forward rather than fragmenting the story.

People who start their own account at Grove's front door (Try Cypress, a chat with Cedar before any account) arrive in Cypress's book too. Their account opens an ONBOARDING deal with them as its contact, entered at Interested because they came to us. Its pinned note, by Cedar, says what they came to do and what Cedar learned in the chat: what they run or buy, how many vehicles, the cars they named, where, when, and what they want, each marked stated (their words) or assumed (Cedar's reading). The deal is Onboarded when Cypress approves them as a dealer, since their business is then a Cypress organization.

Finding a deal

The board carries a search box, and it searches the way people actually hunt: by the car. A VIN or the tail of one, a make or model, a contact's name or email, a company, or the deal's own title — any of them lands you on the deal. Pasting the VIN from an offer email is the fast path to "the deal about THAT car".

What Cedar adds

Cedar reads the deal — its stage, its age, its interactions, its temperature — and writes a short summary with one concrete next step and the channel to use for it. It is a suggestion sitting beside the record, refreshable on demand, never something that moves a deal on its own.

History

Every deal records created, last updated, and a change log of the fields that matter — who changed what, from what, to what, and when. Names are snapshotted at the time of the change, so history still reads correctly after someone leaves the org.

Business rules

• Amounts are money: "500k" is refused with a message rather than quietly saved as nothing.
• A deal's kind is set at creation and shown on every card — a deal cannot be ambiguous about which loop it belongs to.
• A campaign that sources a deal passes on its goal, so the two can never disagree about what the campaign was for.