RiiPilot

Three levels, five stages, one colour rule

The three pictures below are the whole model. Everything else in this manual is one of them, written out.

Where things belong

How a deal moves forward

Why an address has the colour it has

An address is the company. An opportunity is one piece of business with it.

The address is permanent. It has a name, a postal address, contact people, a logo, a history. It never ends, and it is never “won”.

An opportunity is finite: one particular mandate, one placement, one job being pursued. It has a beginning, an agent, an offer, a history — and an end, won or lost.

Three things follow from that:

• One address can carry several opportunities, one after another or at the same time. A customer you won something with in 2024 is a new opportunity in 2026, not a revival of the old one.
• An address does not disappear when an opportunity starts. It stays in the address list — the opposite would mean a company does business only once in its life.
• “Won” means this piece of business was won. Not: this customer is ours now.

When do I start an opportunity?

As soon as there is a nameable occasion somebody is going after. Not when a company merely looks interesting — that is what the address is for. An opportunity without an occasion is an address with extra paperwork.

The seven stages

A stage stands on something you can point at, not on a feeling. The moment “Qualified” means “feels promising”, three people grade the same deal differently and the funnel stops telling you anything.

Won and Lost leave the funnel and the open tiles; they sit in the folded-up sections below the active deals. Setting a deal to Won offers Convert to Client, which is what creates the customer over in FiiPilot.

Every stage can be set by hand at any time by clicking the stage bar. The automatic rules only ever fill in what nobody has got round to.

What happens by itself

Three stages can be read off the record, so the tool sets them:

• New → Contacted — the first contact record of type call, email, meeting or video call. A note deliberately does not count: a note to file is not a conversation.
• Contacted → Qualified — see the next chapter.
• anything → Proposal — an offer is created.

The rules fire after you did something — a saved deal, a saved contact record — never when you merely open a deal to look at it. A tool that quietly rewrites what you are reading is a tool nobody trusts.

Getting to Qualified

Qualified is the stage that decides whether the funnel is worth anything, so it hangs on two facts that are visible in the record. Both have to be there:

• Somebody who decides. In the address, each contact person has a decides tick next to active. It sits on the person, not on the deal — whoever decides at that company decides for every piece of business with them. Marked people carry a small violet decides label wherever they appear.
• The need, written down. In the opportunity, the field What do they need? above the notes. That one belongs to the single deal, not to the company: “two SAP consultants from October, six months, on site in Hamburg”.

If contact people are ticked for this deal, only those count. If none are ticked yet, every active contact of the address counts — otherwise marking the boss as deciding would do nothing until somebody ticked them on the deal as well.

Both present, and the deal moves up the next time it is saved. Nothing is enforced: you can set Qualified by hand without either, and nothing will take it away again.

Common questions

How long does something stay New?

There is no time limit, on purpose. A stage says what has happened, not how long ago. A deal nobody has touched in three weeks is not further along — it is neglected, which is a different thing and does not belong on the same scale.

In practice New ends at the first call. If a deal does get stuck there, that is a visibility problem, and the worksheets are the answer: Follow up picks up anything that has been quiet for a fortnight, New included.

How do I get an email in here?

From Outlook: open the message, select all, copy, and paste it into What came of it. Outlook copies its header along — Von/Gesendet/An/Betreff or From/Sent/To/Subject — and RiiPilot offers to take the date, the kind and the people out of it. Nothing is changed until you say so.

With attachments: drag the message to the Desktop first and drop that .eml file on the box. Then the files come along too. Dragging straight from a mail program into the browser hands it nothing: the file is only created when something asks for it, and a web page cannot ask.

The three sums beside the funnel — where do they come from?

Potential, against the Addresses row, is the “Potential for us” from every address profile added up. It measures the field, not the pipeline: every company on file counts, whether anything is running there or not, so it only ever grows. The company's own revenue figure has nothing to do with it — that is a size, not a chance.

In play, against Qualified, is every open deal added up: the quoted amount where an offer has gone out, and the estimate on the deal where none has. This is the one that answers “what is actually running”.

Out, against Proposal, is the narrower half of that: only the offers actually with a customer, at the amount quoted. It is part of the sum above, not on top of it.

Read downwards they are the field, what is running on it, and the part of that we have put a price on. Hover over any of them and the tooltip says the same thing.

Where do industry, revenue and potential go?

Into Profile in the address — they describe the company and hold for every deal with it. Industry comes from a list; if one is missing, the + puts it there for everyone, deliberately as its own step so that “IT”, “IT ” and “I.T.” cannot pile up next to each other. Revenue carries a year and whether it is estimated or confirmed — a number without that is worth little six months on.

Expected revenue sits on the opportunity instead, because it belongs to that one deal. It is an estimate; the offer amount is what was actually quoted. Where a deal has no offer out yet, the tile shows the estimate with a ≈ in front of it. Nothing is passed to FiiPilot from either — the project budget over there is entered by hand.

A reminder is due — where do I write down what I did?

In a new contact record, and the reminder itself has the button for it: Log what you did opens the deal and the dialog in one step, and ticking the record off closes the reminder. What you wrote in the reminder stays visible above the form while you type.

Why not simply into the reminder? Because a reminder is not a thing of its own — it is a date hanging on the contact record that produced it. That record says what happened on Tuesday. What you do on Friday is a new thing that happened, with its own date, its own people and possibly its own next step. Writing into the old one would rewrite Tuesday.

Just tick off is there for the case where nothing needs recording.

Who else is on this deal?

Under the agent there is a list of everybody else who belongs to this piece of business. Two kinds: from our team picks a name out of the consultant pool, someone else takes a name and an email address. Each of them is either works on it or kept informed.

It grants nothing. Anyone with a RiiPilot login already sees and edits every deal — with a handful of people, walling things off costs more than it is worth. The list answers two other questions: who belongs to this, and who should hear about it later, once RiiPilot can send mail. Somebody in the pool without an email says so in grey; they are a note, not an address.

Taking a person off ends their part in this one deal. They stay in the team list, and nothing in the history changes — what they did stays written down under their name.

Agent or introduced by — what is the difference?

The agent works the deal and is the one FiiPilot pays a commission to. Introduced by is whoever brought it to us without working it — no claim to anything, but the tool counts what each of them brings, so at the end of the year you know who to thank and roughly how much for. The number in brackets behind a name in that list is what they have brought so far.

Introducers are RiiPilot's own list. They are deliberately not in the consultant pool shared with FiiPilot, because they are not consultants.

Something happened, or something is planned?

The first thing the dialog asks, because everything under it follows from the answer. Something happened is a report: when it was, who was there, what came of it, the documents. Something is planned is an appointment: a date, a time, a length, who is coming and what it is about. No result, because there is not one yet.

They are the same entry in two lives, not two records. When the day comes, the appointment is in your tasks; Log what you did opens that same entry, switched to a report, and you write down what came of it. Planned becomes happened. Nothing is duplicated, and nothing is left hanging.

That is why the old field Follow up on is gone. A date stuck on a past record was never an appointment — it had no time, no length, nobody could be invited to it, and setting one on a record that was itself a follow-up produced a follow-up to a follow-up. Instead: write a next step into a report, and a second button appears beside Save — Save & plan the next step. It saves the report and opens the appointment straight away, with the same people, the same kind, the same sentence and a date a week out at ten o’clock, all changeable. It sits where you are already about to click, because that is a decision, not a footnote. The chain reads planned → happened → planned → happened.

Records that already carried an old-style follow-up date keep it and still show the field, so nothing gets lost. New ones do not get one.

Follow-ups in my own calendar

Two ways, and they are not the same thing. Add all to calendar (and the 📅 Calendar button on a single row) hands you a file: a photograph of how things stand right now. Import it twice and nothing doubles up — each date keeps its identity, so the second import corrects the first rather than adding to it.

Subscribe… is the better half: an address your calendar fetches by itself, roughly once an hour. Move a follow-up here and it moves there too, without anybody exporting anything. In Outlook: Kalender hinzufügen → Aus dem Internet abonnieren.

That address is a key, not a link: your calendar cannot log in, so whoever holds the address can read the open follow-ups. It is 64 random characters and it can be replaced in one click — Give me a new address kills the old one on the spot, and every calendar still pointed at it goes quiet.

A planned appointment travels as a real appointment: start, end, and the slot blocked as busy, with a reminder a quarter of an hour before. An old-style reminder has neither a time nor a length, so it stays all-day, does not block the day, and reminds you at nine the evening before — inventing a start time for it would be a claim, not a fact. Deals already Won or Lost drop out, so their dates do not sit in the calendar for ever.

Time and length of an appointment

When is two fields: a calendar for the day, and a small field for the time that you can simply type into. The ▾ beside it opens the full and half hours — the times people actually arrange to speak — already scrolled to where you are. Picking one fills the field and hands it back to you with the value selected, so 10:00 becomes 10:15 with two keystrokes.

Typing is forgiving: 9 is nine o’clock, 930 and 9.30 and 9:3 are all half past nine. Nonsense stays as you typed it rather than quietly turning into something else, and a record saved at 10:07 opens at 10:07.

How long works the same way and appears only for a call, a meeting or a video call — an email does not last, and a note is not an appointment. The list is full and half hours; Other… lets you type an exact number of minutes, and a record saved with 47 minutes still says 47 when you open it again. Left empty it stays empty: “nobody wrote it down” and “it took no time” are different statements.

The strip above the contact history

The whole deal on one line, right above the history it describes: every entry at the day it happened or is due, marked with the sign of the thing itself — the same 📞 ✉️ 🤝 📹 📝 you see in the list underneath, so there is no colour legend to remember. A dashed ring means it is planned and has not happened yet. The blue line is today, so the gaps to the left of it are the weeks where nothing was done.

Click one and you land on that entry in the history, unfolded and briefly highlighted. Hover shows what it was without going anywhere.

− and + change the scale; the word between them says what the axis is counting in at that moment — days, weeks, months, years — not which button you pressed, because a short deal fills the width at the coarsest setting anyway. Zooming keeps whatever is in the middle in the middle. Two entries a few hours apart stand one above the other on little stalks; zoom in and they move apart.

How do I delete an opportunity?

Three places, all of them asking the same question first. The × in the top right corner of its tile on the Opportunities page; the same × on its row under Opportunities inside the address; and, in the open deal, at the very bottom of Details. The crosses sit there in pale grey, take on an outline when you point at the row, and go solid red when you point at the cross itself — together with the row, so it is clear which one it would take.

In the open deal it is deliberately not up beside Done. That is the button you press to leave, twenty times a day; putting an irreversible one next to it is how accidents happen. It sits at the foot of Details instead, where the rest of the deal’s setup is, behind a line of its own.

The question lists what goes with the deal: its stage, its agent, how many offers and how many contact records. What stays: the address, the people at it, and their history. A deal somebody else currently has open has no cross at all.

Events — what happens without us

A contact is something we did. An event is something that happened to them: a new CFO, the owner looking to sell, forty jobs advertised, a piece in the paper. Both belong on the same thread, because the second explains the first — and often explains why now is the moment to call.

An event hangs on the company, not on the deal. „New CEO at Bergmann“ is true for every opportunity with Bergmann, so it is written once and shows up in all of them. Enter it wherever you happen to be: + Event beside + Log a contact in the opportunity, or the Events tab in the address. Both write to the same place.

On the timeline events sit below the line, square, in sand; what we did sits above it, round. One look tells you which is which. In the history underneath they stand in the same chronicle, marked the same way.

An event is never a contact. It moves no pipeline stage, it sets no „last contact“, and it does not wake a sleeping address — entering a press release is not the same as picking up the phone. Where it should lead to a call, Save & plan a call does both in one go: the event is filed and the appointment opens with it as the reason.

Say where it comes from. In six months the difference between „Handelsblatt, 25.06.“ and „heard over lunch“ is the whole difference.

In what order is the contact history?

By when things happened, newest first — not by when somebody typed them in. So a call you remember three days later drops into the place it belongs, below whatever happened after it. Those records say entered n days later, so their position does not look like a mistake. The dropdown above the list switches to entry order when what you want to know is what has been added recently.

The funnel on the start page

Every row is a way in: click one and the list opens showing exactly what that row counts. A stage takes you to Opportunities with only that stage on screen — a line above the tiles says so and offers Show all, because a filtered list that looks like the whole one is a trap. Addresses at the top opens the address list, Won opens the won group already unfolded.

The three sums on the right are in thousands of euros: a column of seven-digit numbers is not read, and the difference that matters is never in the last three digits. Potential is what all the companies on file are judged to be worth; In play is every open deal added up — the quoted amount where an offer has gone out, the estimate on the deal where none has; Offers out is the part of that which is actually quoted. Hover for the exact wording of each.

Contact people: folded, with a face

A company with twenty contact people used to fill the screen with twenty open forms. Now every card is folded and only the one being worked on is open — click a card to open it, click again to fold it. Opening one folds the other, because that is what „the one I am working on“ means. A new contact person opens straight away.

Folded, the line carries what is needed to find the right person: name, the mark saying who of us knows them, position and email address — and the three switches on the right stay reachable without opening anything.

Each contact can carry a photo. Click the circle beside the number, choose a picture, done. It is cropped square and scaled to 320 pixels in the browser before it is sent, so a five-megabyte phone photo does not travel over the line for a circle thirty pixels wide. Where there is no photo the initials stand instead — never an empty circle. The small cross on the picture removes it again.

Who was in the meeting — and who of us knows them

The contact people of the company are the ticks at the top of a record. Underneath, + Someone else who was there adds the rest: somebody from our team, picked out of the consultants pool with their address, or somebody else entirely — a name, an email if there is one, and a line saying where they come from („Deloitte“, „the family’s lawyer“). As many as were there. All of them end up in the line that every list reads, so nowhere shows only half the room.

On a contact person themselves, Who of us knows them? answers a different question: not who they are, but what our way in is. One line per person of ours — several are normal, because you may know the CEO well while a colleague has only met him. Four steps, deliberately fixed rather than free text: knows them personally, well · has dealt with them a few times · has met them once · does not know them yet. Fixed, because the whole point is to be able to ask „who can open this door“ — and a sentence typed freely cannot be asked that question.

The box beside it is free, and that is where the useful part usually sits: from university, same golf club, ran a project together in 2015. The strongest connection shows as a green mark at the top of the card, so it can be seen without opening anything.

Websites, and companies that are part of a group

An address can carry several websites, each with a label saying which one it is: the group, the region, the unit we actually talk to. LKQ Corporation, LKQ Europe, LKQ DACH are three addresses on the web and one conversation — the label is what tells them apart, because the URL alone does not. Typing lkqcorp.com is enough; the arrow beside it opens the full address in a new tab. The first one also serves as the hint for finding the logo.

Ownership and Who do we work with? are two different questions, and they used to be squeezed into one. Vorwerk is family-owned and a group, and we deal only with the branches — as long as „Part of a group“ was an ownership form, one of those two sentences could not be said. Ownership now says who owns it; the field beside it says whether we are dealing with the whole company or with one unit of a group. Any ownership can be either.

Set it to One unit of a group and the group part opens: which group it belongs to, and which brands and companies belong to the group — Kobold, Thermomix, akf bank — a plain note, so that a name in a press release can be placed six months later. Nothing is calculated from it.

And the revenue is asked twice: once for the unit we deal with, once for the whole group. They answer different questions — how big is the house we are standing in, and how big is the room. Added together they would be neither. The field for the unit renames itself accordingly. Both figures keep their own how do we know and year, because a group figure out of an annual report and a unit figure guessed over lunch are not the same kind of number.

Taking the group setting away again does not delete the figures — they are simply not shown. Put it back and they are there. Addresses that were marked Part of a group before this field existed move over by themselves the first time they are opened: the group name goes into its own field, and the setting becomes One unit of a group, which is what it always meant.

What counts as „last contact“?

A call, an email, a meeting, a video call — something said to somebody. A note does not: it is our own memo about the deal, not a word with them, and a memo cannot make a company that has heard nothing for six weeks look alive. An event counts even less, for the same reason. So the dormant mark and the „last contact“ column measure what they say they measure.

Why is my address still in the list after I started a deal?

Because the company has not gone anywhere. The row shows how many deals are running and how far the furthest of them ever got — the same measure the colour and the filters use, so a customer you won last year stays green even while a fresh lead on the same company is only just starting.

What does the turquoise FiiPilot mark mean?

This company is already a client in FiiPilot. Where the address was actually taken over from there, the company name and postal address belong to the client record and are read from it every time — not copied. Correct them in FiiPilot and they are correct here at the next look, with nothing to synchronise.

What is still blank over there you can fill in here: those fields stand open and tinted turquoise, and what you type goes into the client record when the address saves. Filling a gap cannot destroy anything — overwriting an invoicing address from the sales side can, so a field that already carries something stays read-only and is corrected in FiiPilot. The company name is never editable here at all: both systems are matched by it. If somebody has that client open in FiiPilot at that moment, nothing is written and the line under the button says so.

Why is there no “New” in the funnel any more?

Because it was never progress. A deal at New is one that has been written down and not begun — and since Contacted sets itself at the first call, it usually lasts minutes. Above the stages the funnel already counts every address on file, so a second, nearly empty top row said the same nothing twice. The deal still starts there; the pill just says Not started, which is what it means. The line under the funnel says how many are sitting in it.

Where that number does earn its place is Intake on the start page: how many addresses and how many deals each person brought in over the last 30 or 90 days or this year, how many of those were actually begun, and how many got as far as an offer. Counting only what was added would reward typing in names; counting what moved as well is the honest picture. It is measured from the day a record was created, by whoever created it — records from before 28.08.2026 carry their last editor instead, because nothing else was ever written down.

Does Won mean the customer has been handed over to FiiPilot?

No — those are two different things and the list shows them separately. Won (green) says this piece of business was won. The turquoise FiiPilot mark says the company is kept as a client over there. Handing one over is a later, deliberate step: the Convert to client button on a won deal.

So an address can be green without ever being turquoise — not every won deal gets billed as a mandate. And it can be turquoise without being green: an old client of FiiPilot's with a fresh deal here that has not been won yet.

The filter buttons above the address list

They carry the colours of the rows they pick out, which is why there is no legend under them any more. Untouched (white) is an address with no deal on it at all; In progress (amber) is new, contacted or qualified; Bid/talks (light green) means an offer is with them or the terms are being talked through; Won is green; Dormant (red edge) is a running deal nobody has spoken to in four weeks; Also in FiiPilot (turquoise) is a company that is a client over there. Clicking one puts a ring around it rather than changing its colour — the colour is the meaning. One at a time, on purpose: two filters at once produce empty lists nobody can explain.

The two buttons beside the search box write out whatever the list is showing at that moment — same filter, same sort, same search — as a PDF or an Excel file. The file says so in its own heading, so a printout can never be mistaken for the whole list.

Do I have to save?

No. Addresses and opportunities write themselves a moment after you stop typing; the line under the button says Unsaved… / Saving… / Saved ✓. Done writes out anything pending and closes the view.

Somebody else is editing this record

Whoever opens an address or a deal first holds it for twenty minutes. Everyone else can read it, and the lock is released the moment they leave, sign out, or are signed out for standing still.