You have a great sales process mapped out. Now it’s time to customize your pipeline in Pipedrive.
If you haven’t done this before, setting up your pipeline in Pipedrive is a fairly straightforward process, which we will explain below.
Once you define the stages of your pipeline, you will have the ability to add deals into the pipeline and will gain visibility into a deal’s stage, progress, and status. You’ll also start collecting valuable information to help you optimize your sales process.
Once you have your Pipeline setup and start running deals through your process, you’ll be able to track metrics such as the:
The information from these metrics will help you with sales funnel management, forecasting, and benchmarking.
Let’s get started!
If you’ve just signed up for Pipedrive, you will have a default Pipeline with default stages set up for you. These stages are Qualified, Contact Made, Demo Scheduled, Proposal Made, and Negotiations Started. Chances are, however, the stages you want may be quite different (see below for tips on naming stages).
Luckily, changing them to fit your process is fairly quick and easy.
At the upper right corner of your pipeline, click on the name of your pipeline. Then click on the pencil (edit) icon. From there, there are several changes you could make, including:
After you’ve made the changes you want, click Save.
Congratulations! You now have a custom pipeline based on your sales process map.
Another area in Pipedrive that is incredibly valuable to modify is the detail fields.
Out of the box, there are default detail fields you can use to capture information about your Pipedrive people, organizations, and deals.
You will likely want to customize the information Pipedrive tracks, however, to capture data that is unique to your sales opportunities and type of business.
Collecting this information via detail fields instead of notes will make the data much more valuable to you.
Click on your name in the top right corner of the screen. Select Company Settings from the dropdown menu.
A menu will appear on the left. Click Data Fields.
Click the green Add a Custom Field box. Then select Lead/Deal Field.
Next, a dialogue box will appear. Create a field name that makes sense to your team (see below for tips on naming fields). Then choose a field type. The more specific the field type, the better. For example, use a date field type to capture a date rather than just a text field. This will ensure clean, consistent data is entered and will allow you to fully utilize the reporting features of Pipedrive. Similarly, whenever possible use a Single Option or Multiple Options field type rather than a text option. Again, this will allow you to build robust filters and reports much more easily.
Continue to add appropriate fields for collecting information–dates for appointments, types of contracts, referral sources, etc.
Correctly setting up your deal details fields transforms Pipedrive from a note taking tool into a powerful information gathering CRM. You’ll be able to continually improve your sales process based on the data you receive.
Make sure each stage has a clearly defined beginning and end. Pipedrive suggests always using the past indefinite tense. For those who forgot your English classes and sentence diagramming, this tense states an action that happened in the past.
For example:
By using this tense instead of “follow-up call,” your team knows exactly when to move a deal to the next stage. That being said, the tense may not work for every stage in your pipeline. In the above example, you may follow up multiple times, so it may be more appropriate to name the third stage “Following Up” and define that a deal is moved into that stage once the first follow up happens and remains there until the deal is won or lost.
A common mistake many companies make while setting up their pipeline is adding “deal lost” and “deal won” stages. For Pipedrive to be most effective, a “lost” deal is actually a status change–not a stage change.
Without going into too much detail, using a stage instead of a status will drastically throw off your metrics. If you mark a deal as Lost or Won it will “disappear” from the out-of-the-box Pipeline view, but you can always find it again using filters. You can even change your default Pipeline view to include deals where the status is Won, Lost or Open.
Pipedrive makes it easy to rename stages, delete them, or add new ones. So as you’re getting started, feel free to tweak things. If you’ve been using Pipedrive for a while, however, know that changes to your Pipeline stages order, for example, will result in very wonky metrics, so try to nail down your process early on. If you do need to make major changes to your Pipelines after having used Pipedrive for a while, I recommend creating a new Pipeline rather than adjusting an old one.
Check in with your team a couple of weeks after you get your pipeline all set up. See if it is helping them or making things more complicated. Take the feedback as an opportunity to tighten up the pipeline, patch up any leaks, and make your sales process as effective as it can be.
Are you still struggling to incorporate your sales process into Pipedrive? Book a strategy call.
