Support work is reactive: something arrives, you deal with it. Plenty of customer work isn't — onboarding a new account, chasing a renewal, qualifying a lead. That work has stages, and it stalls silently when nobody is looking.
A pipeline is a board for that. You define the stages, and the things that move through them are companies or contacts you already have in Gleap.
This is the part worth understanding before you build one. A pipeline tracks either companies or contacts — you choose which when you create it — rather than free-standing records you invent.
That's a real difference from a classic sales CRM, and it's an advantage where it fits: a company on your onboarding board is the same company whose conversations are in your inbox, so you see the support history and the onboarding stage in one place.
It's a limitation where it doesn't. A record sits on a pipeline once, so if you need several opportunities against one company at the same time, this isn't the shape for that.
You can still record the numbers. Each pipeline can carry its own fields — a deal value, a seat count, an owner — which live on the entry rather than on the company, and can be totalled per stage.
Onboarding — from signed to live, with the stages your implementation actually has.
Renewals — so a contract coming up is visible months before it lapses.
Qualification — tracking which signups are worth a conversation.
Anything with an owner and a next step, which support queues handle badly.
The same pipeline can be shown as a board with a column per stage, or as a table with a row per entry. The board is for moving things along; the table is for reading across everything at once.
A ticket is a conversation that ends. A pipeline entry is a relationship that continues. Trying to run onboarding as a ticket means either closing it before the work is done or leaving something open for weeks — both of which distort what your inbox is telling you.
The two aren't separate, though: a ticket can be linked to an entry, and an automation on the board can raise one.
