The deal that gets away rarely dies in a dramatic way. Someone asks about your pricing on WhatsApp, an agent sends the numbers, the customer says they'll check with their partner, and then the chat slides down the inbox under forty newer ones. Nobody dropped it. Everyone just stopped seeing it.
Sales funnels put those conversations on a board instead. Every deal your team is chasing becomes a card: the contact, what it's worth, the stage it's in, who owns it, how long since the chat last moved. Instead of scrolling the inbox trying to remember which leads are still alive, you read the board.
Board and inbox stay tied together: a card opens the chat in one click, the chat carries the deal in its side panel, and when a lead changes hands both of them follow. The rest of this page covers building a funnel that matches how you sell, and then working it day to day.
Funnels, stages and deals
Three words come up constantly below, and they aren't interchangeable.
- A funnel is one sales process, an ordered set of stages. The editor and the API both call it a pipeline. Same object, different word. An account can hold several, say one for new business and one for renewals.
- A stage is a column on the board. Every stage is one of three kinds, open, won or lost, and that kind is what tells Wassenger whether the deals sitting in it are still live.
- A deal is a card: one contact, a title, an amount, an owner, a stage. A contact can hold one open deal per funnel, so the same person can be a new-business deal and a renewal deal at once, but never two new-business deals.
Most deals carry a WhatsApp conversation. Some don't: a lead you type in from a number you've never written to starts without one.
Building your first funnel
- Open Sales funnel from the side menu. With no funnel in the account yet you're taken straight into creating one; with one already there, Manage on the board opens the editor.
- Give the funnel a name, a currency, a colour and a description. Every amount in this funnel is in that currency.
- Work through the stages. Rename the ones you were given, add what's missing with Add stage, drop what you don't use with the cross on the row.
- Set a days limit on any stage that should chase you. A deal that sits there longer gets the Stalled badge. Leave it empty and the stage never flags anything.
- Click Save changes.
A new funnel doesn't start empty. It arrives with New lead, Contacted, Negotiation, Won and Lost already in place, so if that's roughly how you sell you can go straight to step 5. Each stage also has a kind, open, won or lost, and that's what decides whether the deals in that column count as running or closed. Every funnel keeps at least one of each.
The rules that stop you losing work
The editor refuses three things on purpose:
- A stage that still holds open deals can't be removed. Move or close those deals first.
- A funnel with open deals can't be deleted.
- Deleting a funnel keeps its won and lost deals, so your closed history survives the clean-up.
Running more than one funnel
Add a second funnel and a picker appears at the top of the board to switch between them. The funnels list shows all of them together, with their stages and currency.
Working the board
Each column is a stage, each card a deal. A card shows the title, the contact, the amount, how long since the conversation last moved, and an avatar for whoever owns it. The header above counts the deals on the board and totals what they're worth.
Moving a deal along
Drag the card into another column. That's it. If you'd rather not drag, every card carries a button that advances it one stage, so you can work down a column at one click per card.
Winning and losing
While you're dragging, Won and Lost zones appear on the board, so you can close a deal from wherever it's sitting instead of hauling it across five columns. Dropping it into a won or lost stage closes it. Drag a closed deal back into an open stage and it reopens, and the reopening goes into its history.
What happens to a deal once it closes
Closing a deal doesn't delete it, archive it, or hide it. It stays in your account, with its whole history, its comments and its conversation. What changes is how much of it the board keeps in front of you.
The Won and Lost columns show the deals closed in the last 30 days. They carry a 30 days mark next to their figures that says so. Older closed deals leave the board, because a column that never forgets grows without a ceiling: a funnel running for two years would open with thousands of cards in Won, and the board would be slower and less useful for the work you actually have in front of you.
The full history is in the funnel's metrics panel, from the Metrics button in the board header. There you get what the funnel won and lost over its whole life, the conversion between the two, the reasons deals were lost ranked by how many they cost, and a list of the deals behind every one of those figures.
So if a deal you closed last quarter isn't in the Won column, nothing has gone wrong and nothing is lost: open the metrics panel and it's there. The same deals are also reachable through the API with status=won or status=lost.
The badges that tell you where to look
- Stalled. The deal has been in its stage longer than that stage's days limit.
- Cold. The conversation has had no activity for more than three days.
- Unread. The chat has messages nobody on your team has opened.
Two filters sit in the board header. Mine narrows the board to the deals you own, Stalled to the ones past their stage limit.
Adding a deal from the board
- Click the + on the header of the column you want the deal to land in.
- Type the customer's phone number.
- Give the deal a title.
- Set the amount.
- Save it.
If that contact already has a chat on your number, the new card links straight to it. If they don't, the deal starts without a conversation and adopts one on its own as soon as that contact has a chat on the number. Nobody has to connect them by hand.
Handing a deal to a teammate
The avatar on the card is the ownership control. Click it, pick a colleague, done.
Deals and conversations are owned separately, and Wassenger keeps them in step without forcing them together:
- Reassign a deal and you're asked whether the chat should follow. Say no and the conversation is left exactly as it was.
- Reassign a conversation in the inbox and the deal follows on its own.
Either way the hand-off is written into the deal's history. And because agents only see their own deals, handing one over takes it off that agent's board.
The deal record
Click a card and it opens into a full record with a link of its own. Paste that link into a message or a ticket and whoever picks the deal up next lands on all of it at once.
The right-hand column holds the identity of the deal: contact, amount and currency, stage, status, the agent who owns it, when it was created and how long it's been sitting where it is. Stage and owner are editable right there. Under them the contact card carries an Open chat button.
Comments and tasks
The left-hand column is where the team writes things down. Type a comment about the lead and it's saved on the deal. Add a due date before you save and the same comment becomes a task with a checkbox. Overdue tasks rise to the top of the list, so what you promised on Monday is the first thing you see on Thursday.
Two things worth knowing. Comments are never posted into the conversation, so nothing you write here reaches the customer. And they outlive the chat: old messages eventually expire, comments on the deal stay. That makes this the right place for the context you'll want in three months.
The history
Everything that happens to a deal is recorded. Created, moved, won, lost, handed over, edited, archived, reopened, each with who did it and when. You can comment under any entry, which is how you explain why a deal was lost right where the loss is written down.
When the deal has a conversation, those same events also show up in the chat thread as small system lines, the same kind of entry you already see for an assignment or a resolve.
Suggestions that read the conversation
When a chat with an open deal gets new messages and then goes quiet for half an hour, Wassenger reads the recent exchange. If there's something worth saying, it lands on the deal record as one of two things: a suggestion to move the deal to a particular stage, or a warning that the deal looks at risk.
Suggestions need the AI assistant, so they come with Business and above. On Professional the board works exactly the same, without the second opinion.
Each one comes with a one-sentence reason and the exact sentence from the chat it rests on, so you can check the reasoning against the source instead of taking it on faith. Move the deal applies it. Dismiss makes it go away.
Where the model stops
- It never moves anything itself. Accepting a suggestion is the ordinary stage move, made by you.
- It never proposes Won or Lost. Closing a deal isn't a decision worth putting one click away from a sentence a customer typed.
- It doesn't linger. A suggestion expires the moment any new message lands in that chat, whoever wrote it, so you're never acting on a reading of a conversation that has since moved on. A risk warning clears once your team replies.
The model only sees the messages
The reading is done by an AI model. It sees the messages of the conversation and nothing else, so your internal comments are never sent to it. Nothing the model produces goes out in webhook payloads either.
The funnel inside a conversation
The board isn't the only door in. Every one-to-one chat has a Sales funnel block in the contact side panel, listing that contact's open deals with the funnel name, the amount and a stage selector.
From there you can move a deal along without leaving the chat, open the full record, or hit Add to funnel to create a deal for this contact on the spot. For agents who live in the inbox this is the whole feature: something you update while you talk, not a second tool you have to remember to open.
Who sees which deals
The funnel has its own visibility rule, and it's deliberately stricter than the inbox's.
- Agents see only the deals assigned to them, on the board, in the chat panel and through the API. Other people's deals don't appear at all, even where that same agent is allowed to read those conversations in the inbox.
- Admins and supervisors see every deal in the account.
- Everyone can create, move, edit and close whatever they can see. Visibility is the restriction, not what you're allowed to do with it.
Funnels themselves are managed by admins and supervisors. A permission called Create and manage sales funnels controls who gets the editor. It's on by default for both roles, and you can switch it off per role. For the wider picture, see team roles and team permissions.
Plan, limits and downgrades
Sales funnels come with three of the Platform plans. There's nothing to enable and nothing to install. What changes is how many funnels you can hold: one on Professional, three on Business and ten on Enterprise. The suggestions that read the conversation need the AI assistant, so they start at Business. One number in the account on any of those is enough for the Sales funnel entry to appear in the side menu for the whole team; below them, the same entry offers the upgrade instead.
Deals live on numbers that carry the feature. If a number later drops below it, its deals and comments stay readable but stop moving, so a downgrade never destroys your history.
Each funnel holds up to 20 stages, with one open deal per contact per funnel. When you reach the number of funnels your plan allows, creating another one is refused with a message naming that limit, and the funnels you already have keep working.
Using it from the API
Everything on this page is available over REST under /v1, authenticated with your API key. The visibility rules carry over exactly, so an agent's key sees only that agent's deals, and deals created through the API say so in their history. You can list and edit funnels, read a per-stage summary of open deals and amounts, create deals, move them between stages, read the history, and write comments and tasks. The full reference lives in the API documentation.
From Developers > Webhooks you can subscribe to deal:stage:changed, deal:won, deal:lost, deal:assigned, deal:updated, deal:archived and deal:reopened. Deal creation is recorded in the deal's history only, and no payload ever includes the AI fields. New to webhooks? Start here.
Not here yet
Three things to know before you go looking for them:
- Sales funnels aren't in the mobile app.
- Stages can't be reordered from the editor, though the API can reorder them.
- Stage colours, per-stage automations and the tuning of the AI reading are API-only for now.
Why it sits next to the inbox
Every sales team already has this board somewhere. In someone's head, in a spreadsheet that's stale by Thursday, or nowhere at all. Keeping it beside the conversations means the follow-up you owe somebody turns up as a card with a badge on it, on the same screen as the chat you have to answer anyway. No export, no second tool, no lead quietly ageing out of view.