How to create a sales pipeline with AI

Before opening any tool, you need to know what your sales process looks like. A typical pipeline has these stages:

1. New prospect: someone who showed interest (filled out a form, wrote to you, was referred).
2. First contact: you’ve already reached out or called.
3. Meeting or demo: you had or scheduled a meeting.
4. Proposal sent: you sent pricing or a formal proposal.
5. Negotiation: they’re considering, asked for adjustments.
6. Closed (won or lost): they made a decision.

You can adapt these stages to your business. If you sell design services, maybe between “Meeting” and “Proposal” you have a “Brief” stage. The important thing is that each stage represents a concrete action on your part.

Trick: open Claude or ChatGPT and tell it: “I have a [describe your business] business. Help me define 5 or 6 sales pipeline stages, with a phrase indicating what I should do at each one.” AI generates the skeleton in seconds.

1. Log in to your HubSpot CRM account (https://app.hubspot.com).
2. In the sidebar, go to Sales → Deals.
3. You’ll see a Kanban-style board with columns. Each column is a pipeline stage.
4. To customize stages, go to Settings (gear icon) → Objects → Deals → Pipelines.
5. Edit the default stages or add the ones you defined in Step 1. You can rename them with a double-click.
6. Save your changes.

The free plan includes one pipeline and unlimited contacts. If you need more than one or want automatic email sequences, the Starter plan ($20/mo) adds up to two pipelines and more features. Prices may change: confirm on the official page before paying.

1. In the Deals board, click + Create deal.
2. Fill in the deal name, contact, estimated value and current stage.
3. Save. The prospect appears in the right column.
4. To move a prospect to the next stage: drag their card to the next column.
5. When you open a deal, you can add notes, tasks (e.g. “call on Tuesday”) and attached files.

AI trick: if you have a long list of prospects in a spreadsheet, tell Claude or ChatGPT:

I have this list of prospects with these columns: [paste an example].
Help me classify each one into one of these pipeline stages:
[list your stages].
Return it as a table.

AI suggests which stage each one belongs to and you confirm. It saves you hours of manual work.

Follow-up is where deals are won or lost, and also where the most time is wasted writing similar emails. AI helps you draft them in seconds.

Example prompt for Claude or ChatGPT:

You're a sales assistant. I have a prospect named [name]
who requested a proposal 5 days ago and hasn't responded.
The deal is worth [value] and it's about [describe the service].
Write a short follow-up email (max 100 words),
in a professional but friendly tone.

Then adjust the tone, add personal details and send it from HubSpot (in the deal record, “Email” tab).

Templates by stage: create a different prompt for each pipeline stage. For example:

• Stage 1 (new prospect): introduction email.
• Stage 3 (post-meeting): thank-you email with a summary of the conversation.
• Stage 5 (negotiation): email addressing objections.

Save your best prompts in a document to reuse them. Over time you build a library of messages that sound like you, but AI writes them.

HubSpot CRM generates basic pipeline reports: how many deals are at each stage, the total value and how many are lost at each step. AI helps you interpret that data and make decisions.

1. In HubSpot, go to Reports → Pipeline reports.
2. Export or copy the table with results from the last 30 or 90 days.
3. Paste it into Claude or ChatGPT and say:

I have this sales pipeline data: [paste the table].
At which stage am I losing the most deals?
What might be going wrong and how can I improve follow-up?
Give me 3 concrete actions.

4. AI identifies bottlenecks and gives you concrete suggestions.

You can also ask it to generate a monthly analysis template you fill in each month, as if it were your personal sales assistant.

Complement this tutorial with How to automate tasks without code using AI if you want to connect your CRM with other apps like Gmail, Slack or your spreadsheet using Zapier or Make.

1. Log in to HubSpot CRM and open your Deals board.
2. Verify that the stages reflect your real sales process.
3. Create a test deal and move it through all the stages.
4. Open Claude or ChatGPT and generate a follow-up email for that test deal.
5. If everything works: delete the test deal and start adding your real prospects.

Problem	Fix
I don’t see the Deals board	Go to Sales → Deals in the left sidebar
I can’t edit the stages	Go to Settings → Objects → Deals → Pipelines
HubSpot asks me to pay	The basic pipeline is free: check you haven’t activated premium features
AI generates very generic emails	Give it more context: prospect name, service, deal value and last interaction
I don’t know which stage to assign a prospect	Pick the stage that reflects the last action you took with that person