Setting up stages
You define the stages yourself to match your actual sales process. A coaching business might have: Inquiry Received, Discovery Call Booked, Proposal Sent, Client Won, Client Lost. A service business might keep it simpler with three stages.
Each stage can have a dollar value associated with it, so GoHighLevel can calculate the total value in your pipeline at a glance.
Opportunities (deals)
Each card on the pipeline board is called an opportunity. An opportunity links to a contact record and has its own fields: deal name, value, close date, status, assigned user, and notes.
One contact can have multiple opportunities. For example, a client who has bought one service and is considering a second would have two opportunities in the pipeline.
Automating pipeline movement
Workflows can create opportunities and move them between stages automatically. When a contact books a call, a workflow can create an opportunity in the "Call Booked" stage. When the call happens, another trigger can move it forward.
This removes the need to manually update the board after every interaction, which is where most CRM data goes stale.