Streamline Your Business Processes with the Best Pipeline Management Tool

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hello my name is Paul Meiners welcome to another one of my pipedrive training videos in this video I'm going to give you a getting started guide on how to begin using pipedrive this video is really intended for anyone that is still new to pipedrive and not sure where to start in terms of customizing your account or how to use this tool on a daily basis so I'm going to be covering some of that in this video and I'm also going to give you an overview of the different tools and features available in pipedrive so that you understand what this tool can do but if you would like to go into any of these features or Topics in more detail then click the link above to look at my pipedrive training playlist on YouTube I have loads of videos covering how to get the most out of pipedrive if you have any questions at the end of this video please leave me a comment below and if you would like one-on-one help with setting up your pipedrive account automating your sales process and training your team on how to use this tool to its best ability and close more deals then click the link in description below to learn more about my pipedrive Consulting options now to begin this video let me explain what pipedrive is so you can decide if it's the right tool for you and I'll explain how it's a little bit different to other sales crms on the market like Salesforce Monday and HubSpot so first and foremost pipedrive is what I would call a sales CRM it's a tool that you can use to track the different sales opportunities or what we call deals through the various stages of a sales process and on that deal you can store everything related to the sale you can put your notes you can create activities to remind you when to follow up and you can see your email communication with the people you're selling to when you use pipedrive correctly I think it can help you to close more deals and generate more revenue for your business because you are following up in a more efficient and timely manner and you're not letting good sales opportunities get missed or fall through the cracks I've been using pipedrive since 2015 when I started using it I was working in mortgages and then I became a pipe rev consultant and took my business full time and I've been using it to run my Consulting business ever since we actually don't consult on any other CRM because we use pipedrive every single day it's what we know really well and quite honestly we think it's the best pipedrive is what I would call my source of truth it's where I of course manage all my sales opportunities but it's also my master contact list so every client I've ever worked with but also just other professional contacts that I'm in touch with I put all of those people in pipedrive so I can manage all of my important relationships in one place in terms of how pipedrive is different to other crms on the market of course I'm a little bit biased but I think pipedrive is simple and easy to use and a lot of the clients we work with agree I also think it's quite a lot more affordable than a lot of other crms and check out this video I'll link above to look at my video on pricing and the different pricing packages and add-ons for pipedrive pipedrive was originally designed by sales people who were frustrated with the crms on the market and they designed pipedrive for sales people with the emphasis on making it easy to use because if sales people like and enjoy using the CRM they're more likely to keep it up to date and the tool is more useful but that's enough talking for now let's get into it and let's have a look at how to get started with pipedrive so here I am logged into my demo account of pipedrive and at the moment I'm on the main deals page here's the sidebar here's the navigation here I'm just on the deals screen at the moment and I'm looking at all of the different deals or sales opportunities and I can see where they are at in my my sales process I'm going to come back to that to explain the navigation options on the left here at the top we have the leads inbox this is where I can upload for example a spreadsheet of prospects or leads that I want to cold call or reach out to you know I haven't yet qualified these people yet and I need to qualify them before I convert them into deals I could also use some of pipedrive's uh lead booster features here like live chat chatbot and web forms and I can feed leads from my website directly into my pipedrive account so that's the leading box we also have like I showed you before the deal pipeline I can see the qualified sales opportunities and where they're at in my sales process and I can set up multiple pipelines for different types of Revenue or different sales Journeys for my business pipedrive also has a projects add-on this is where I could create projects to manage what we need to do after we win a deal so for actually you know delivering our product or service I can create and manage projects in here I can also create and send marketing campaigns so instead of having to connect third-party tools like MailChimp or activecampaign I could actually do my marketing from here we have the inbox or mail inbox where I can see my email my connected Google or my Microsoft account and I can see email that's coming in and syncing with pipedrive we have the activities list this is where I can see what activities I have due today for the deals and leads that I need to follow up on we have an area for contacts this could be either people or organizations that I'm selling to this is where I can see everyone in my database and and access important contact information on the insights tab I can view dashboards I can create reports to report on how my sales team are performing I can understand our conversion rates and why we're why we're winning or losing deals in the products tab I can set up my products for the various products or services that we offer which I can then attach to my deals and then we have this Marketplace tab where I can connect other third-party software to my pipedrive account and a couple more options here in the more options menu next I'm going to explain how information is organized in pipedrive and this is where maybe pipedrive is a little bit different to other crms you've possibly used in the past so on the deals page here we can see the different deals or again think of them as sales opportunities that we're working on now if I open one of these deals we're on the deal page here and on the left I can see the contact person and the organization that this deal is linked to now some crms work a little bit differently where you have a contact person and the contact person themself is the lead or is the sales opportunity and so you simply create a contact and just specify that it's a lead with pipedrive it's different you create a lead or a deal in this case and you link that deal to a person and to an organization and it's important to understand how contacts and organizations and deals are linked together because it creates a bit of a hierarchy for example I have apple here so apple is an organization that we are selling to or in this case I've labeled them as a customer and down here on my sidebar I can see the different people or employees that work at Apple so I can go here to Tim Cook and now I'm on the contact page for Tim Cook I can see the name up here I can see all of Tim's contact information and details and if I scroll down I can see that Tim is linked to the Apple organization and any notes I put on here activities I log like these ones or emails that I send to Tim Kirk anything I do on this contact will actually get summarized at the organization level so if I go back to the organization here you can see this timeline where I can see activities some of them here are linked to Tim Cook some are linked here one to Johnny Ive a couple more to Johnny and if I scroll down I can see some notes Here linked with you know this Tim Cook deal so at the organization level I can see all of the notes emails and activities that are associated with any of those contacts and because everything is linked I get this nice big sort of 10 000 foot view of all of our activity and interactions with the company here on the organization level and at the top here I can see the different deals that we have linked with Apple so I could actually have multiple deals or sales opportunities running simultaneously for an organization so if I go to this Tim Cook Apple deal here again I can see the deal is linked to Tim and the Apple organization and so again any notes any activities any emails I put here on this deal will all show up both on the Tim Cook contact and the Apple organization and if I go back to Apple now if I go to the Johnny Ive deal you can see this deal is still linked with apple but it's linked to the Johnny Ive contact so these notes and activities will all show up on the Johnny I've contact and on the Apple organization it's important to wrap your head around this early on because I see a lot of people making mistakes especially when it comes to importing contacts to pipedrive they import a list of contacts but they haven't actually created a deal through that import process and so when they look at their deal pipeline they go Hey where's all my deals and so you need to create a deal and make sure it's linked to a contact person and an organization okay with that out of the way let me give you some tips on where to start in terms of customizing your pipedrive account the first thing I would do when setting up your pipedrive account is customize your pipeline and these stages now as I mentioned before you can have multiple sales pipelines which you really only need to do if you have different sales you know Revenue streams or quite different sales processes so here's a pretty normal sales pipeline where I've got qualified leads coming in here from my lead inbox I book a meeting I Define the client's needs send a proposal and then send a contract if I go to my mortgage pipeline you can see the stages are quite different we've still got qualified lead but then interview complete we have to get documents submit applications to lenders the stages here or the Milestones that we need to accomplish are quite different one of the mistakes we see people making is creating too many pipelines pipelines for different sales people or different regions but you can filter your pipeline up here we can view only the deals linked with certain sales people so I can see which deals each person on my team is managing and I can also use filters to look at deals in specific regions or different types of deals to customize your pipeline you can click the edit button up here and from here we can rename and change the how we want to name these stages I can also drag and drop to reorder them and I can click here to add new stages if I need to and when defining your stages I recommend thinking about what are the major Milestones or things we need to do to progress a sales opportunity you know and get it closer to a confirmed sale so in this case you know we need to book a meeting first and you can see I've actually phrased my deals in all my stages in the past tense so it's very clear deals in this stage we've got a meeting booked but we haven't completed it yet needs to find is we've now completed the meeting and we've defined what it is they need help with proposal sent clearly defines that everyone in this stage has received the proposal and now they're you know making a decision and then people in the final stage they've received the contract and now they need to sign so this makes it very clear when I look at my deals here I know exactly where each person is I know that these people you know are making their decision now when customizing my pipeline I can also enable this rotting feature so you can see here I haven't done it for all my stages but for my proposal sense stage I've said deals should start to rot in 14 days so this basically means if a deal is inactive in other words I haven't touched the deal I haven't updated it I haven't logged an activity I haven't followed up with an email I haven't changed the deal in any way within this 14 day window then the deal turns pink and it has this little red warning here so this tells me that this deal has been rotting for 49 days so if you look at your sales Pipeline and you see lots of pink deals that's obviously an indication that deals are not being followed up in a timely manner if I then do something to this deal let's let's click on the little activity icon here let's say I decide to follow up today so I'll reschedule this activity let's say I'm going to schedule this to today instead you can see now the deal turns white it's no longer rotting because I've now updated the deal you can also see at the top of your pipeline the total value here of all the deals in this pipeline so this is basically the sum of of these values here so I can see what is the value or potential Revenue we can get from all of these different deals and I'm also given a weighted value so because I'm unlikely to win every single one of these deals I don't know my conversion rate is not 100 pipedrive is helping me to estimate what is the likely Revenue I'm likely to get from these deals and the way this weighted value is calculated is if I edit my pipeline stages here you can see there are these probabilities so starting from the left a qualified lead has about a 40 chance of being one at that stage but as I progress as I have a meeting to find their needs send a proposal and send a contract you can see the probability is increasing up to the point where if they've got a contract the deal is about 95 of the time going to convert and so those probabilities get multiplied by the deal values to give me this weighted value and that just helps me understand what is the potential or more likely Revenue that I'm going to get from these deals so there are a few different ways I can view my deals this is the normal pipeline view which we're on up here this is probably what you'll use most of the time but there is also this list view if I want to sort of see my deals in more of like a spreadsheet table format I can customize these columns and choose to display things like the value of the deal the deal type any of my custom Fields I can show in here this is useful either if you plan to export your data you can export this View and all the columns down into Excel if you need to use that data in any way or from this view I can bulk update I can either select all my deals or I can select specific deals and then I can make bulk changes on the right hand side if I want to change deals to a certain stage or change the owner of those deals and finally we have a forecast view this is only available to users on the professional plan and what this helps me do is understand what is the likely Revenue I'm likely to generate this month based on the expected close date of my deals so if we take a look at this Bruce Wayne deal here on the left here is the expected close date this is generally something you put on the deal when you're kind of further along in your sales process maybe Bruce has said look we're really interested in in buying your service we're going to be signing up I would put an expected close date to represent when I expect to win this deal by and so with that date I can then see the total value of deals I expect to win this month or coming up in the following months now once you have your pipeline ready and you've defined your sales stages I would recommend creating a deal so that you can start playing with piperrive and getting familiar with the system to create a deal you can simply click the quick add button up here and you can click deal or you can just use the shortcut d and it's going to pop up this input menu now when you create the deal it's going to ask you to link the deal to a contact person and an organization now if you type the name of a contact that already exists give pipedrive a second you can see I can then click here Tim Cook and it's going to link this deal to the Tim Cook contact and the Apple organization that way I'm linking this deal to my existing contact in the system or I can type the name of a new contact Elon Musk and you can see here it couldn't find an Elon Musk so it's going to say add as a new contact and you see the little new indicator there and we need to put in a company for Elon which company should we use let's use SpaceX again it's going to try and search for an organization it can't find one so we're going to create the organization as well I can if I want I can input some details for Elon on the right hand side Elon at SpaceX .com and I can fill in some information if I know the value of the deal I probably don't at this early stage if I know the expected close date and some of my other custom fields which we'll be setting up are available here as well but for now let's just go ahead and create this new deal and so what I did there was I actually created three things I created the deal which is this page that we're on now I created the Elon Musk contact person and I created the SpaceX organization and everything is all linked so that's the best way to input a deal to make sure everything is linked properly you can see here on the SpaceX organization Elon is linked here as a person and we've got the deal here as well now I just want to pause there for a second I'm going to come back and I'm going to talk about how to use the deals page in a sec but now I just want to revisit leads quickly and explain how leads fit in alongside deals in your sales process so let's head on over to the lead inbox now as I mentioned earlier this lead inbox is useful really for prospecting or if you're doing any kind of cold Outreach so maybe you've got a list of people in your target industry or demographic you can upload a spreadsheet if you go to the import menu here and you can import that list of leads to this lead inbox you can click on a lead and this is a bit like a mini deal all my deal custom fields and I can link it to a contact I can link it to an organization just like I can with a deal I can put notes on here I can store I can log activities and I can send emails from the lead now the use case for a lead is I would create leads or upload that Prospect list for contacts who I have no relationship with we're reaching out to them for the first time and they're unqualified we don't really know yet if they're going to be a good fit for the product or service that we're selling and so you start them off as leads you can you know put your notes log your activities send your emails all from here and then when you make contact with them when you qualify that yep Tim Cook is a a good lead you can then convert this into a deal so you click that convert button and that's going to move the lead out of this lead inbox and it's going to put it on this deal pipeline that's why my first stage here is qualified lead the other situation where I would use the lead inbox is if I'm using pipedrive's lead booster add-on I have these features that I can use I can put a live chat or a chat bot interface on my website for customers to interact with my sales team I can also create web forms if I want to put an inquiry form on my website and there is this prospecting tool where I can put in my target demographics and piperrive can suggest leads that I should reach out to so if you are using those features if you've got inquiry forms on your website that can feed into this lead inbox you can then qualify the inquiry before you convert it to a deal now not everyone uses the lead inbox it really depends on your sales process for example in my business business most people come to me pretty qualified and warm already most people see my videos they go to my website there's a bit of a qualification process on the site before you can then book a call and so when you do a book I use zapier actually to add my calendly bookings as deals in my pipeline so I don't really have much need for that lead inbox I'm not doing any kind of cold Outreach or prospecting so don't feel like you have to use that feature but deals generally everyone is going to create a deal for the sales opportunities that you are trying to close right to pick up where I left off I've created this deal for Elon Musk and it's linked with Elon and the SpaceX organization now in this summary tab I can put some important information about the deal up here I can put in the value of the deal that represents what is the deal worth from a revenue standpoint so I can either say this is a ten thousand dollar deal and so by attaching that value that is going to update the value of my pipeline up here if I want to be more specific I can add products to my deal so the products we can set up in the products tab over here and when you have products or Services set up I can add a product I can then start typing so let's say I'm helping Elon with Asana which is another service that we provide support on uh maybe this is going to be a 5 000 job you can set up various um variations of products if you have different sort of packages that you offer that can all be customized in the products uh menu I can also attach multiple products to a deal if I need to quote for multiple services or products that we offer maybe we're doing some Asana and maybe I'm also helping with the uh SpaceX brand maybe that's going to be a maybe let's say seven seven and a half thousand dollar job I can change quantities I can apply discounts I can put taxes in here I can put notes on my product I can change my currency whether this is tax inclusive or not and then when I'm happy with how my products are set up I can save that and that is going to update the value of my deal I always recommend trying to use products if it's relevant because not only does it more accurately break down the value of the deal but from a reporting standpoint I can generate a report a bit like this that shows the value of the deals that I've won segmented by product or service so I can understand what products or services are driving value and revenue for the business it's also really useful especially if I plan to use pipedrive for quoting or invoicing I'm not going to go into this in this video today but using pipedrive's smart docs feature which I do have a video which I'll link up here I can create document templates for quotes or I can use invoicing Integrations and those products will become the line items on those quotes or invoices and that allows me to just do more of that kind of mundane admin paperwork right inside pipedrive and I'm not having to copy and paste information from one tool to another in the summary field you can also add labels to a deal I like using this for a way of saying if the deal is hot warm or cold basically whether it's likely to convert or not some people use this differently and use labels to denote the type of deal here we can update the expected close date that I've shown you before and if I scroll down to this details section this is where we can create custom fields or data fields to capture additional information specific to my sales process now when setting up custom fields in pipedrive it's important to add fields to the correct object so in this details panel this is generally information specific to this particular deal or sales opportunity or transaction essentially so if Elon has approached me I can write a bit of a summary here about you know needs help with SpaceX website and brand I can write a bit of a summary and so if I then do another deal with Elon in the future maybe I'm helping him with Tesla it's going to have a brand new summary it's going to be a different deal type so this information is specific to the deal or this particular sales opportunity scrolling down we have custom Fields related to the contact itself so this is where I can put in elon's contact information his his name phone number title and so on I can put in extra fields for things like his birthday spouse that type of thing and if I create a new deal in the future you know this these details will change for that new deal but this information is all still the same he still has the same contact details and then finally you've got custom fields on the organization that you can create and so this could be useful for things like what type of business is it is there a parent company what industry do they operate in number of employees website that type of information so just keep that in mind when setting up your custom Fields is make sure you're putting the field on the correct object you can either add new fields in here by going to customize Fields or the other place where you can do this is in your company settings if we go to data fields here I can see all the fields related to leads and Deals leads and Deals share custom Fields because you start a lead as a lead and you convert it into a deal so they share those custom fields I can put custom Fields like I said on the person the organization and I can't even customize fields on products and even projects that we create as well so I'm going to create a new field in here let's go customize fields and add a custom field you can start by giving your field a name for example maybe I want to use a custom field to show the main point of contact for this project so I'm going to say point of contact now for field type there are different types of fields we can create so you've got normal text or large text Fields you can create drop down menus either a single option or multi-option if you want to be able to select more than one choice there's autocomplete numerical monetary user is quite useful if you want to link other users in pipedrive for example I have this sales development rep field if I want to link who was the SDR that helped with this deal I can also link extra organizations I can put in dates addresses that type of thing so for this point of contact I'm actually going to use the person field on the right I do have some options I can specify if I want this to be shown always visible in that detail summary I want to I can specify if I want to input this in that deal pop-up menu that we saw earlier and also if I'm using projects I can display it in my project view as well if I'm unprofessional I can choose which pipelines does this field apply to so maybe it's not really relevant for mortgage or sponsorships it's only relevant for this particular sales pipeline that I'm in right now and if I'm unprofessional I can also enforce certain quality roles so I can say this field has to be filled in from The Proposal sent stage and later this means if my team one of my sales people tries to move the deal to the next stage and this field has not been filled in they're going to be asked to fill in this field they're not going to be able to progress the deal until that is filled in so let's go ahead and save that now and click done so now I can fill in this field and because it's a contact field I can type in the name of a contact pipedrive is either going to search the database for a contact or in this case I can create a new contact and that now I can go and you know update that contact which is linked to the deal some of the other fields that I've got here so you can see here's an example of a drop down menu a single option drop down I can input the sales development rep so here are my pipedrive users I can specify which SDR helped me with this deal I can put in date fields I can specify times for things like booking times or appointment times I can use numerical fields for things like the client's budget or possibly even tracking commissions and a field that I recommend everyone should have this is super useful everyone needs this is deal source so where did the deal come from maybe this was a referral that's going to be really useful later on I can do a report where I can see for the deals that I've won how many were from referrals versus Facebook or LinkedIn and I can really drill down into what marketing is working well or I can say if a contact referred this person so those are my deal details really nice sort of snapshot there of the key information about the deal and again at this stage I would also recommend customizing some of those contact and organization Fields as well so at this point we've Now set up your pipeline stages and we've customized the fields on the deal the person and the organization now I want to share some best practices in terms of how to use pipedrive on a daily basis now the big takeaway here is keep pipedrive up to date I recommend keeping pipedrive open in your browser throughout the day so if you get on a phone call or you are exchanging emails with a lead you have pipedrive ready and you can be updating the CRM so you can put your notes into the deal you can log your activities or your interactions and you can schedule what you need to do next the majority of the deal page is dedicated to seeing a timeline of all the history the changes the notes activities and emails related to the deal so really think of this as somewhere you can look to see everything you might need to know about a potential deal and a lot of people sort of believe that yeah we want to put everything on the deal so if somebody on my team is away or a salesperson is ill we we can go to the deal and we've got all the information in one place now up the top here we have a few different tools available firstly we can type in notes at any time this is useful for storing notes during a meeting potentially or a bit of a summary about what you need to do next important information related to the deal so I can attach that note and it goes down into my history I can also on the activities tab schedule activities for what I need to do next and we have various activity types so I've got email call Demo call voicemails and so on now you can actually customize these activities to your sales process by going to the company settings and then on the company settings tab here go to activities and here is where you can set up new custom activity types for your business now one main reason to set up a new or custom activity type is from a reporting standpoint here's an example if I go to my insights I've got this report here that shows any activity completed this year I've got you can see my timeline along the bottom and I'm segmenting by type so I can see how many calls emails referrals proposal presentations and things we've done so that's a really nice sort of useful thing we can do with pipedrivers see what are we doing what activities are we doing each month how much follow-up are we doing I can also segment this for different people on my team so I can see which sales people are doing certain activities so that's one of the main reasons you want to customize these activities is if there's something specific you want to report on like how many presentations we've done or quotes we've sent if you want to report on those kinds of things set those up custom activities when I create an activity I can just give it a simple due date if I just want to say this is an email follow-up due on the 7th I can just say it's due all day or if it's a meeting maybe I've got this meeting at a specific time I can put in a start and an end time and you can see it gets scheduled on the calendar here there are options to connect your Google or your Microsoft calendar to pipedrive so if I schedule this here in pipedrive it will actually go on to my Google or Outlook calendar so I could give this a custom name like meeting with Elon to scope project and I'm using the meeting activity type if I want I could actually invite guests to this meeting so this is when I click save and send it's actually going to send an invite to this person and it's going to add the meeting as an appointment on both of our calendars I can either type in a location or if I have a zoom Microsoft or Google meet integration setup I can actually create a video conference link right here inside of pipedrive I can put some notes in here these are for internal use so this is just a reminder to myself of like what we're talking about in the meeting or during the meeting I might type my notes in here to log you know what it is we discussed whereas the description here this is the public facing description that Elon in this case would see and then down the bottom you can assign the activity to somebody on the team so this is obviously an activity for me but I can assign activities to Lindsay or Warwick other people on my team if they need to do something for this deal and because I've created this activity on the Elon Musk deal the activity is also being linked with the Elon Musk contact person and the SpaceX organization and so by logging that activity here if I go to the SpaceX organization I can see that note and my activity at the organization level as well because everything is linked I'm not going to cover all of these features here but the other main thing I want to highlight in this video is the email integration now I don't have my email connected for this demo account so if I just switch over to my main account when I click in here I've got my Google account connected so what I can do is I can compose an email directly here in pipedrive and then when I hit send it's actually going to send the email through my Google account in this case so I can still go to my Gmail and see that email in my sent items but I'm just composing it and sending it from pipedrive doing it from pipedrive is really nice because it just keeps a heap a history of the email on the deal so I can go back and look at those conversations but it's also really quick and convenient so I can have pre-built templates ready to go I can pick one of my templates which populates the email the person's name fills in with these fields and I can choose if I want to track opens and clicks uh for the email as well and then I can hit send then if the recipient Warwick in this case replies I'm going to see that reply both here inside the deal and in my mailbox over here as well now this email sync feature does require you to be on at least the advanced subscription of pipedrive or greater I usually recommend people get at least Advanced unless you're on a tight budget in which case get essential but I recommend at least Advanced purely for this feature actually because it's really convenient being able to send and receive your emails natively in pipedrive and if you want to learn more about using this email feature including how to automatically trigger emails when you move the deal to various stages then check out this video that I've linked up here with more details about email sync now one of the most important things you'll do with your CRM is manage your follow-up now the best practice with follow-up is make sure that every single one of your deals always has an activity scheduled so you know what you need to do next even if that's just following up on a quote you know maybe the ball is in the other person's court now you've sent that quote you've sent that proposal but being a good proactive salesperson you should have an activity scheduled on your deals to follow up at an appropriate time give them a call send them an email that says hey you know have you made a decision decision is there anything else we can do so that's the first key best practice is make sure you always have an activity scheduled on the deal then on a daily basis you can work from your activities list to see which follow-ups you need to do that day I can see all my activities on the activities tab here and there are a few different view options and controls on this page firstly in the top left I can filter and look at only certain types of activities if I want so if I want to only look at you know emails and you know these certain activities I can turn on these filters to be honest I don't really ever use that personally but the option is there on the right hand side I can change the view so at the moment I'm looking at all my activities but I can view the activities for other members of my team if I want to see what other people are doing and then here we can change the time frame so I can look at everything due this week or anything that's potentially overdue as well now this little number here number eight this represents the sum of the activities you have due today and activities that are overdue so you can see up here I have eight activities due today which is why this is showing eight if I had let's say two that were overdue as well this would actually show a 10. so your goal each day is get that number to zero to do that I recommend working from this screen I quite like enabling this split view feature so I can then pick a deal the deal slides into view but I can still see my activities in the background I can then look at the deal make any changes update the stage change my notes uh I will then Mark the activity as done to say that I've done it I've actually got two here in this case and then when you complete all the activities on the deal you're going to notice this pop-up appear pipeline is basically prompting you and saying now that you've completed all the activities you should schedule the next follow-up so rather than ignoring this which is what most people do I would then say right I'm going to follow up in seven days time and I'll put a little reminder to myself follow UPS on quote so just a little reminder of what I'm following up about so now I have this scheduled in a week's time and so in one week I will see that on my activities list and so I would continue like that throughout the day I want to get all these activities complete and then schedule new ones as I go if I don't have time for everything maybe I just have a busy day and I don't quite get to everything I would recommend selecting anything that you didn't have time for and then changing the due date to tomorrow so bump them to tomorrow rather than letting them go over to you which ends up getting really messy reschedule them to tomorrow or the next day that way you never have anything overdue and you've always got you're always keeping on top of those activities on your deal page you can get a bit of a sense of whether you're keeping up or Not by taking by looking at these little icons so this green icon here shows me that I have an activity due today the gray icon tells me that I have an activity scheduled in the future but not today the red one tells me that this has this deal has an overdue activity on it so this one was due earlier today and this yellow warning tells me that I have nothing scheduled on this deal so when you look at your deal screen here you want to see no red or yellow like these ones that's bad because you're falling behind or in this case of Johnny Ive I don't have anything reminding me about what to do next so this deal May well get forgotten about as my pipeline fills up I'm probably going to forget about that so try and keep those activities up to date you don't want any red or yellow on this screen you only want to see the green and gray indicators here now as you progress your deals through these various sales stages throughout the process you may need to lose the deal so at the top here I can mark the deal as lost that's basically my way of closing the deal and saying we didn't win it and it's it's now dead there's nothing more we can do and up here I can specify a lost reason now these are all customizable if I go to my company settings here I can Define my own custom lost reasons so the most common ones are maybe the client doesn't respond it was a pricing issue they went with another option a competitor or it was just a case of bad timing or maybe they didn't give a reason my tip for this page is do not allow for free form entry of lost reasons I think pipedrive should remove this feature quite frankly what that would mean is that people can then type in anything they want which makes the reporting a bit well a lot Messier instead I think it's better to have people choose one of the options from this list and so now I can say right price was too high elon's budget is only five thousand dollars so I can put a bit of an explanation in here as well and I can lose the deal so it turns red you can see my lot my uh comment has been added and the lost time has been recorded down here I can change that if I need to usually you don't but if you need to change that for reporting purposes you can and now that deal has vanished from my pipeline it's still in the system I can search here for Elon Musk and I can see there's the Lost Elon Musk deal so it still exists in pipedrive but by default the pipeline only shows you deals that are still open unless I use a filter I can look at all my lost deals if I need to if Elon ever comes back to me one day and says he's raised a bit of money and he has the budget now I can come up here and I can reopen the deal and of course ultimately the goal is to win the deal so I can click the one button up here I've now marked the deal as one I get a little celebration like this the one time is recorded here again for reporting purposes so in my insights I can see how many deals were won each month and marking deals as one or lost at the appropriate time is really important because then it's going to update my reports so I can see for example here how many deals I won each month I can also report on things like my conversion rate so I can see how many deals typically get to each stage of the process if there's a big drop off occurring at a certain stage I'll be able to see that so I hope you have found this video useful I was gonna go on and talk next about automation but I'm already over 40 minutes on this video now so I think it's better that I end it there if you'd like to learn more about the features that I've covered in this video and some of the other features that I didn't like Automation and Reporting check out the other videos on my YouTube channel which I'll link up here and if you'd like help with setting up and learning how to take full advantage of pipedrive please click the link in the description to learn more about our pipedrive Consulting options thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next video