Pipedrive Troubleshooting: Overcoming Pipedrive’s 4 Biggest Workflow Issues

Today I’m going to talk about pipedrive and some of the kind of regular mistakes that I see when I get to meet new clients.
I’ve been working with clients now for probably about four or five years and there seems to be a bit of a theme in terms of some of the common mistakes that I see. Getting over these mistakes will probably cure about 80% of the issues and improve your sales workflow.
So what I want to do is take a look at the four individual issues themselves.

So one of the first things that I generally look at is the number of pipelines that a customer has set up. So here we see a typical pipe drive setup and if I just click on the number of pipelines here we can see, I mean I’ve hidden the details, but we can see that there are probably 20 or so pipelines and this is a kind of common issue in the fact that the trick is, unless the pipeline is completely different, is to try and use the same set of stages and then use custom fields for example to keep the number of pipelines as small as possible. Stop confusion, avoid over complicating it, avoid sales people putting data into the wrong place or putting deals into the wrong pipeline. So that’s probably one of the first places that I go, how many pipelines do you have? Ideally you want one possibly two definitely less than five. Having 15, 20 plus or for one client 37 just makes it really really confusing and I would look at trying to remove that by using custom fields or custom data as much as possible.

So the next area that I look at is how many stages do we have in the pipeline and if we take a look at this particular pipeline as an example there are 24 stages within this pipeline and what’s really interesting is we look at you know this kind of halfway point here then we can see that most of this is empty and this is usually a good sign that we really do not need this number of stages if all of the deals are sat only in one half of it. So again let’s look at you know a lot of these stages here are in the negotiation stage so let’s leave it in one particular stage called negotiation and let’s look at looking at the data and the actions and the activities within that negotiation stage to avoid having this many stages within the pipeline. The issue with this is it’s very difficult to see it reduces the actual amount of space within the cards of the deals themselves and just generally makes it really difficult to look at in terms of working with the pipeline itself.

The third thing and it’s linked to this is again we look at these blank areas of the pipeline itself but we can see that the actual contract signed is here in about the middle. All of these stages are beyond the point where the deal is won or lost and this is not uncommon but it’s not the way that pipe drive is supposed to be used. The end stage should be won or lost. Anything that comes after that is essentially prolonging the sales process and when we look at our insights and we look at the measurements for how long it takes you to close a deal by adding in all these additional stages you’re unnecessarily lengthening the sales process. You essentially won the deal around here in the middle of the pipeline so why have we got all of these other pieces? It’s quite common that the finance team or the operations team will want to add in these additional stages but I would recommend against it. Really anything that comes beyond the point of sale should be in your finance system or it should be in your ERP system or it should be in your operations system. The CRM here of pipe drive in this particular case is there to drive sales and so at the point that sales stopping made the deal is won or lost that’s the point that you want to end the pipeline. So I see this quite a lot this is quite a common one try not to add anything or do not add anything beyond the one or lost point. So the fourth and last area though I want to look at again really common one is the activities area. So as we can see here we just go to the activities tab and all of the activities are listed. I’ve got it set for everyone but we can see here just looking at this I’ve hidden the details but it’s all red which means that some of these activities were due and were never followed up and if I look at this it has quite a lot of old data in it quite a lot of it from 2019 and I shan’t bore you with the details but this is the second place that I would expect a sales person to go as soon as they kind of log in to pipe drive on any given day. The first place is deals just to get an overview of the deals that are assigned to them and then the next place is this activities tab and if it’s got a whole load of old data in here the sales person doesn’t really know what the next activity is. So again I would encourage you to ensure there is no red so it’s color coded red means there’s an activity that has not been followed up on that has not been completed. Green means that there’s an activity for today that needs to be completed and then black means that there is an activity for the future so it’s beautifully color coded so it’s relatively easy for sales people to kind of follow up on this process. That’s really it’s relatively simple relatively straightforward these are the four areas that I always go to in terms of taking a kind of overview of any particular customer setup on pipe drive so it’s let’s look at the deals, let’s look at the stages, let’s look at the number of pipelines and then the devil is in the detail let’s look at the number of activities are those activities being followed up on and that’s it if you follow the ideals for these four stages you’ve probably got your pipe drive setup and your sales process 80% of the way there. So I hope this video was useful just by keeping an eye on those four areas of pipe drive you’ll probably got about 80% of it under control and you’ll have a great sales workflow. Thanks very much see you in the next video.