Nutshell’s new draft pipeline status allows you to experiment with sales process stages, outcomes, and automation without affecting open leads in your current active pipeline or exceeding plan limits.
If you’ve ever wanted to rethink your sales process—but hesitated because you didn’t want to disrupt real deals—you’re going to like this one.
Draft pipelines give you a safe place to design, test, and refine your pipeline before it ever touches an open lead. That means you can plan smarter, optimize faster, and go live with a process you’re confident in.
What is the draft pipeline status in Nutshell?
Draft pipelines are pipelines that you can fully configure and refine without counting toward your plan’s pipeline limits and without accepting any open leads.
Here’s what that looks like in Nutshell:
New pipelines now start as drafts by default.
Draft pipelines can’t contain open leads. They’re strictly for planning, testing, and historical data.
Drafts don’t count toward your plan’s pipeline limits—create and optimize as many pipelines as you want!
You can still customize them completely. That includes stage names, outcomes, automation rules, user assignments, follow-through, and more.
You’ll find all your draft pipelines under the “Draft” tab on your Pipelines setup page.
When you’re happy with your new process, you can activate the pipeline so it can start receiving open leads.
Plan and optimize your sales process—before anything goes live
Draft pipelines are all about giving you time and space to get your process right.
With the draft status, you can:
Experiment with your stages: Try different stage names and sequences to better match how your team actually sells.
Refine outcomes and follow-through: Make sure every path—won, lost, or closed for another reason—triggers the right follow-up and reporting.
Dial in automation: Configure pipeline-specific automation rules without worrying about accidentally firing them on in-progress deals.
Because drafts are separate from your active pipelines, you can do all of this work without:
Interrupting reps who are working open leads
Accidentally rerouting deals into an unfinished process
Burning time rebuilding something that went live too soon
The result: You launch a pipeline that’s already thought-through and ready to support your team from day one.
Test changes without risking open leads or cluttering your plan limits
Draft pipelines give you the freedom to test new ideas without worrying about limits or accidentally sending leads down an unfinished pipeline.
No open leads allowed: Draft pipelines can’t contain open or pending leads at all. That hard line keeps experiments from impacting your live deals.
No impact on pipeline limits: Because drafts don’t accept open leads, they don’t count toward your plan’s pipeline limit. You can create and refine as many drafts as you need while you’re planning.
Full visibility in reporting: If a draft pipeline has closed, won, or lost leads, it will still show up in reports and filters—so you never lose historical data that matters for analysis.
Move Active leads to Draft: Draft status isn’t just for brand-new pipelines—you can move existing ones back into draft to safely adjust stages, outcomes, and automation without affecting in-progress work. It retains all of its closed, won, and lost leads, so you keep your historical data and reporting intact.
This makes draft pipelines perfect for:
Testing a new sales process for a specific product or territory
Trying out a different qualification framework
Modeling a new follow-up process before you roll it out to the whole team
Refining existing sales processes
You get to refine quickly, and when something works, you flip it on—simple as that.
How to get started with draft pipelines in Nutshell
Here’s how you can start planning and testing your next process in a draft pipeline:
1. Create (or identify) your draft pipeline
Create a new pipeline—Nutshell automatically saves it as a draft.
Or, move an existing pipeline from Active to Draft after relocating all open leads to another active pipeline.
2. Configure your process
In draft status, set up everything you need:
Stages and stage order
Outcomes (won, lost, closed, etc.)
Automation rules
User assignments
Follow-through actions and other settings
Take the time to make sure the process matches how your team actually works and how you want leads to move from first contact to close.
3. Review and finalize
Before activating, double-check:
Do stage names clearly reflect what’s happening?
Are outcomes and automation rules aligned with how you want to handle each result?
Is this pipeline easy for reps to understand and follow?
This upfront review helps you avoid mid-flight changes that can confuse your team or skew reporting.
4. Activate your pipeline
When your draft pipeline looks the way you want:
Open the pipeline.
Click “Activate pipeline” in the upper right.
Confirm in the modal.
Once activated, the pipeline can start receiving open leads or be used as your default pipeline, depending on how you configure it.
Start planning your next high-performing pipeline today
Draft pipelines make it easier to plan, optimize, and test your sales process before it ever touches a live lead—so your team can spend less time fixing workflows and more time working the right opportunities.
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Launch optimized pipelines with confidence!
Experiment, refine, and perfect your pipelines before working leads through with the new draft pipeline status. See how easy it is to optimize your sales pipeline.
