Start from how you actually sell
Before opening the settings, write down the sales process as it happens today, not as it appears in a slide:
- Where do opportunities come from? Inbound requests, referrals, events, outbound prospecting, partners.
- What has to be true to move forward? A first meeting held, needs confirmed, a proposal sent, a decision maker involved.
- Who does what? Who qualifies, who runs the meeting, who writes the offer, who signs.
This gives you the raw material for pipelines and stages. If two very different sales motions coexist, for example new customers and renewals, or projects and recurring products, they usually deserve separate pipelines.
Pipelines and stages
A stage should describe something that has happened, verifiable by anyone looking at the deal, not a feeling about the deal. "Proposal sent" is a stage; "Hot" is not.
A few rules that keep pipelines useful:
- Five to seven stages are enough for most B2B processes. More stages mean more clicks and less accurate data.
- Each stage has an exit criterion, written in the stage description, so that the whole team moves deals in the same way.
- Win probability per stage can be set to feed the forecast, but only once you have enough history to set it honestly.
- Lost reasons are a short, fixed list. They are the most underused source of insight in any CRM.
Leads, deals, people and organisations
Pipedrive separates leads, opportunities that are not yet qualified, from deals, which live in a pipeline. Keeping unqualified contacts in the leads inbox stops the pipeline from filling up with noise and keeps the forecast realistic.
Contacts are stored as people linked to organisations. Decide early how you handle groups with several companies, distributors and partners, and agree on naming rules. Duplicates created in the first month are expensive to clean later.
Fields: as few as possible, as many as necessary
Every custom field is a question asked to a salesperson, many times a day. Keep only the fields that someone will use for a decision, a report or an automation:
- Required fields only where the data is essential, such as source, segment or expected value.
- Drop-down options instead of free text wherever you will want to filter or report.
- No duplicate information: if a value lives in the ERP, it should be synchronised rather than retyped, a topic we cover in integrating Pipedrive with your other systems.
Activities: the heart of the method
Pipedrive is designed around activities: calls, meetings, tasks and deadlines scheduled on each deal. The simplest rule with the biggest effect is that every open deal has a next activity. A deal without one is a deal nobody is working on.
Connecting Gmail or Outlook so that emails and calendar events are linked to deals automatically removes most of the manual logging that makes salespeople abandon a CRM.
Automations, without overdoing it
Workflow automations, depending on your plan, can create follow-up activities when a deal enters a stage, notify a colleague, or update fields. Start with a handful that remove repetitive work, for example:
- create a follow-up task a few days after a proposal is sent;
- assign new leads from the website to the right person;
- alert the account manager when a large deal has had no activity for a set period.
Automate a step only after the team has done it by hand for a while and agrees on how it should work. AI features, such as suggestions on which deals need attention, are useful on top of clean data, not as a replacement for it.
Reports that management can trust
The questions management asks are usually few: how much is in the pipeline, what will close this quarter, where deals are lost, and how each salesperson is doing on activities. Build those dashboards first, check them against reality for a few weeks, and only then add more. Reports are trusted when the definitions behind them are agreed, the same principle that applies to any data platform.
Permissions, privacy and adoption
Decide who sees which deals, and document it. Contacts are personal data: sign the provider's data processing agreement, define retention rules and record the legal basis for prospecting, as described in our notes on nLPD and GDPR.
Adoption is a management task as much as a technical one. A short training on real deals, a weekly pipeline review held in Pipedrive rather than in a spreadsheet, and a named owner for the configuration make the difference between a CRM that is used and one that is merely paid for.
Where to start
Map your sales process, configure one pipeline with a minimum set of fields, connect email and calendar, and run it with the team for a few weeks before adding automations. If you are coming from spreadsheets or another CRM, plan the migration as a separate step. As a Pipedrive Authorized Partner, our CRM and office automation service sets up and integrates Pipedrive so that sales and marketing work from the same data.