I am trying to decouple the probability of a deal closing from the stage of a sale.  

They are not the same - if a customer I trust says "we are going to do this", then I can assign it a high probability, no matter what stage the sale is in.

Can you please help me to do so?

Also, in a related question - how can I put expected value of a deal (value*probability) into a report?

thank you-

Chris