Build a creator sales pipeline in Bento

Once you're pitching a few dozen brands a month, tracking conversations in Gmail stops working. You lose track of which brand asked for a rate sheet, which wanted a revised concept, and which still hasn't paid an invoice from a month ago.

Bento's pipeline is a board built for that mess: every pitch becomes a deal card that moves through stages from pitched to paid, with reply status and deal amounts on the card and, on paid plans, opens. It's included on every plan, including free. Below is how to use each stage well, the one signal worth acting on the same day, and the parts you still have to keep up by hand, because the pipeline only reflects reality if you update it.

The stages, and what to do in each

Each deal sits in one stage at a time and moves left to right as the conversation progresses. That makes it obvious where your bottleneck is: a pile of interested replies that never reach negotiation usually means slow responses on your side rather than a problem with your pitches.

1. Pitched. First email sent, waiting to hear back. This is always the fullest stage, because only a fraction of pitches get any response. Let the automatic follow-ups do the work here.
2. Opened or engaged. On paid plans, Bento shows when someone opens your email or clicks your portfolio. It means the pitch reached a person; it isn't a reply, so don't chase it like one.
3. Replied. They've asked for rates, samples or ideas. Answer within a day. A warm reply cools quickly, and most lost deals at this stage are lost to slow responses.
4. Negotiating. Video count, usage rights, whitelisting and payment terms. Usually the longest stage. Keep the agreed terms in a note on the card so you're not searching the thread later.
5. Contract and production. Bento doesn't have e-signatures, so the agreement goes out through a separate tool, such as Jotform Sign, and the card waits here until it's signed and the work is delivered.
6. Paid. Done. The card stays as a record, and it's useful later: the rate you charged and the terms you agreed are right there when the same brand comes back.

What the pipeline doesn't automate

Moving a deal to paid is a manual step, not something that happens when money lands. Bento has no connection to accounting tools such as QuickBooks or Xero, or to your bank, so the board only matches reality if you update each card. For a solo creator with ten or fifteen live deals, that's a small habit. For anyone juggling forty or more, pair the pipeline with an invoicing tool that tracks payment status itself, and treat the board as the view of conversations rather than the source of truth for money.

It also doesn't remind you of deadlines unless you note them. Add the delivery date and the payment due date to each card in production, and look at that stage every Monday.

Why open activity matters more than it sounds

If a brand you pitched three weeks ago suddenly opens your email several times in an afternoon, someone is reviewing it now, probably ahead of a planning meeting or because a colleague asked whether anyone had pitched them. A short, casual check-in sent that day has a real chance of moving things forward in a way the same message a week later wouldn't. Something like: "Hi Jess, wanted to check whether spring creative is still open. Happy to send two concepts this week if it is."

That's the one part of the pipeline that changes daily behaviour rather than just organising what you already know. Check open activity once a day rather than once a week, and act on bursts. Open tracking comes with Bento's paid plans; on the free plan you'll see replies but not opens, and Apple's Mail Privacy Protection inflates opens for some readers anyway, so treat a single open as noise and repeated opens as the signal.

Using deal amounts to plan your income

Put a value on every card from the moment a brand replies, even an estimate. Then the negotiating and production stages become a forecast: add up what's in production for next month and you know roughly what's coming in, and how many new deals you need to replace it. Creators who do this stop the feast-and-famine cycle, because a thin production column is visible weeks before it turns into a thin bank balance. When the forecast dips, that's the week to send more pitches, not after the work runs out.

Look at your paid deals every quarter, too. Which brands came back, what you charged them, and how long each deal took from first pitch to payment tell you where to focus. Repeat clients and short sales cycles are worth more than one large deal that took four months to close.

A weekly pipeline routine

Ten minutes on a Friday keeps the board honest. Move every deal that changed stage this week. Archive anything in pitched that finished its follow-ups with no reply. Check production deadlines and unpaid invoices. Then look at the numbers: how many pitches went out, how many replied, how many reached negotiation. If replies are low, the problem is your targeting or your first line; if negotiations stall, look at your rates or your response time. Our guide to rewriting Bento's AI pitches helps with the first, and our guide to pricing brand deals with the second.

Mistakes that make a pipeline useless

• Not updating cards. A board that's two weeks stale is worse than a spreadsheet, because you'll trust it.
• Keeping dead deals in pitched. Clear them out so the active ones stand out.
• Tracking deals that came in outside Bento elsewhere. Add inbound and marketplace deals as cards too, so all your income is in one view.

Used consistently, the pipeline replaces the multi-tab spreadsheet most creators were using before, and it's the cheapest way to stop losing deals you already won the hard part of.