CRM optimization is a complex topic that often requires strategic planning. That’s why at Pressure Consulting we offer a service called “Scoped Optimisation”.

However, at the very beginning, you can focus on the low hanging fruits of CRM optimization.

In this article, we’ll see three examples of automations that revolve around two main ideas: saving time and improving data consistency in your CRM system.

Before we start, it’s important to point out that all these three ideas rely on the “Automations” feature which is available from the Pipedrive “Advanced” onward. At Pressure Consulting, we recommend having access to an automation feature within your CRM system as it is a game changer when it comes to keeping your data in order and your operations lean.

Automate changes of ownership across objects in Pipedrive

Regardless of the structure of your pipelines, as a general rule, you want to keep all the objects in your CRM system well organised, especially when it comes to ownership.

Usually CRM admins ensure that, when deals are assigned from one team member to another, the linked contacts and organisations also change ownership.

Not doing this can lead to multiple team members contacting the same prospect (one from the deal view, the other from the contact view) or, depending on the visibility settings in your organisations, to the owner of the deal not being able to see the contact details of the prospect. That’d be rather silly, wouldn’t it be?

If you’re using Pipedrive, you can avoid having to manually change the ownership of contacts and organisations when a lead or deal is reassigned.

In fact, by leveraging the “Automations” feature, these actions will be triggered and will run behind the scenes.

Moreover, in the case of contacts or organisations being linked to multiple deals or leads, you can also define some rules within the automation, so that contacts and organisations will stay with the owner of the deal/lead that has the highest priority.

With an automation like this, you or your CRM administrator won’t need to repeat the same ownership change twice or more.

Automate the creation of deals in Pipedrive

Generally companies use their CRM system in the following way: they use different pipelines to mark important milestones of the relationship they have with their prospects and customers.

For example, they might have a “Qualification” pipeline at the end of which contact has been established with the potential customer, an “Acquisition” pipeline which marks the steps necessary to convert a prospect into a (paying) customer and an “Upselling” pipeline which sets the goals for revenue-oriented account management’s activities. Alternatively, some companies use a “Retention” pipeline, which outlines the steps necessary to meet the monthly or annual recurring revenue targets.

Depending on the structure of an organisation, these different pipelines may also be used by different teams, which handle the prospect/customer at different stages of their lifecycle.

This degree of complexity can lead to a few issues when it comes to the creation of deals within your CRM system: you may end up with deals that have the same name, deals whose names are misspelt or simply deals that aren’t created, causing you to lose sight of your customer.

This is the reason why you should automate the creation of deals in Pipedrive.

In fact, Pipedrive’s built-in automations will allow you to trigger the creation of a new deal, based on either the stage or the status of another deal.

In this way, you can ensure that:

• All the deals marking a phase of the customer relationship are created in the right pipeline and assigned to the right team member.
• Deals’ names follow a naming convention you’ve set up internally, perhaps including the ID of the company they’re attached to (this comes handy when carrying out ad-hoc analyses).

Automate the change of pipeline stages in Pipedrive

Automating the creation of deals will already ensure more consistency in your CRM data. However, you can bring this principle one step further by automating some key changes of pipeline stages.

In fact, moving a deal from one stage to another is often a manual process and as such, is prone to error.

In case you want to analyse the efficiency of your teams in building their pipelines, stage changes will be of the things to monitor.

Also in this case, Pipedrive’ “Automations” feature comes to the rescue!

In fact, you can trigger changes of pipeline stages based on the activities your team members log on deals.

For example, you can set up an automation that puts a deal in the “Contact Made” stage as soon as your team member calls or emails the prospect. This will ensure that you no longer will have to wonder how many accounts have been “touched” or not yet.

Conclusion

The ideas seen so far are just three examples of how you can leverage Pipedrive’s automations to save time and increase data accuracy within your CRM system

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