Trevally Kanban Boards: Turn Your Contacts into a Sales Funnel or Recruiting Pipeline

Every pipeline is really a list of people moving through stages: leads becoming customers, candidates becoming hires, buyers becoming owners. Most Kanban tools make you retype those people as cards. Trevally doesn't. Its Kanban boards are built directly on your contact base, so each card is a living contact with its messages, files and history attached. This guide walks through the whole feature, with two working examples: a sales funnel and a recruiting pipeline.

What is a Kanban board in Trevally?

A board is a set of columns (your stages) with contact cards moving through them. Here's a sales funnel mid-work: leads in New Lead, one in Contacted, another already at Proposal Sent:

Look closely at the cards: each shows how long the contact has been in the stage and live counters for messages and attachments exchanged with them. These aren't sticky notes. Click one and the full contact card opens. You can keep several boards and switch between them from the header, and each board carries a priority flag so the important pipeline stays visible.

How do you create a board?

Click New Board and a wizard sets everything up in four steps:

Step 1: Board information. Title, description and priority. The description is worth using: it's where you write the rules of your pipeline, visible to everyone working on it.

Step 2: Columns. Define your stages, each with a title, a description of what the stage means, and a WIP limit (the maximum number of people allowed in the stage at once). Drag to reorder them anytime.

Step 3: Team members. Boards are collaborative: invite people with an access level: Viewer (can look), Member (can work), or Admin (can manage).

Step 4: Contacts. Fill the board from any of your data sources: individual contacts, contact lists, or imported files:

For recruiters: a hiring pipeline

Here's a real recruiting board: Applied → Screening → Technical interview → Final interview → Offer:

Why this works better than a spreadsheet of candidates:

• Every candidate card carries their email history and attachments: the CV they sent is already there, on the card, via their contact record;
• Time-in-stage is visible at a glance, so candidates stuck in Screening for two weeks stand out immediately;
• WIP limits keep interview stages honest. If Technical Interview is capped at 6 and full, the bottleneck is visible before it hurts;
• The hiring manager joins as a Viewer or Member, seeing exactly the same board.

Adding candidates as they apply is fast: search your base, pick from a list, or use the picker's New Contact button when someone completely new comes in:

For sellers: a sales funnel

The same mechanics make a clean sales funnel, whether you sell houses, web products, or run a store with recurring wholesale buyers. Stages like New Lead → Contacted → Qualified → Proposal Sent → Closed map one-to-one to columns, and because cards are contacts:

• A realtor sees every buyer's conversation thread and the documents they've exchanged, right on the card;
• A SaaS founder can pour an entire imported LinkedIn cohort into New Lead in one click;
• A store owner watches the message counters. A lead with zero messages in Contacted is a follow-up waiting to happen.

Contacts join the funnel from any source, using the same picker chips you know from the rest of Trevally:

Switch the source to Lists and an entire contact list (say, everyone from last month's open house) joins the funnel as one selection:

Managing columns as your process evolves

Each column has an options menu for editing or deleting the stage:

Editing opens the column's settings (title, description, WIP limit) and one more panel that deserves its own section:

The hidden gem: columns that act on their own

Column Event Triggers turn a stage into an automation. When a contact enters the column, Trevally runs the events you've chained there, in order:

• Wait: pause for minutes, hours or days before the next event;
• Send Message: email the contact automatically;
• Repeat Event: run the previous event again;
• Send File and Send Link are visible in the list, arriving next.

The Send Message editor is where it gets powerful: type {{ and insert the contact's real attributes (first name, company, any field on their card), each with an optional default value. Every recipient gets a personally addressed email, written once:

Put together, a sales funnel can greet every new lead by name the moment they land in Contacted, wait two days, and follow up, hands-free. A recruiting pipeline can confirm receipt to every applicant in Applied.

And the detail that makes it trustworthy: moving a contact to another column cancels their pending automations from the previous stage. The candidate who just accepted your offer will never receive the automated "thanks for applying, we'll be in touch" email.

Working as a team

Board membership is managed anytime from the header: invite a contact, set their role, and track pending invitations with resend and cancel controls:

Invited people who aren't on Trevally yet receive an invitation. The board brings your collaborators into the platform the same way Courier does with file recipients.

Measuring the pipeline

Boards also come with an analytics view: total contacts, conversion rate between stages, and charts of how people flow through your pipeline: the numbers a recruiter reports on Friday and a founder checks before standup.

Build yours in five minutes

Pick the process that lives in your head (deals, candidates, buyers) and give it columns. Your contacts are already in Trevally; the board just makes their journey visible, shared and, with event triggers, partly automatic.

Connect your inbox for free and drag your first contact into a pipeline today.