How to Set Up Your Pipeline in Pipedrive

Want a free Pipedrive setup guide specific to your business? Download it here.

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, don't worry: setting up your pipeline is a fairly straightforward process, and we'll walk you through it below.

In this article we'll cover:

• Editing the stages of your pipeline
• Adding custom detail fields
• Tips for more effective pipelines

Prefer to watch? This 5-minute video gets right to the heart of the BEST way to configure your pipelines:

Editing the stages of your pipeline

If you've just signed up for Pipedrive, you'll have a default pipeline with default stages set up for you, such as Qualified, Contact Made, Demo Scheduled, Proposal Made, and Negotiations Started. Chances are, though, the stages you want are quite different (see the tips below for naming stages).

Luckily, changing them to fit your process is quick and easy.

1. In the upper right corner of your pipeline, click the name of your pipeline.
2. Click the pencil (edit) icon. From there you can:
   • Change the name of a stage
   • Add stages
   • Delete stages
3. When you've made the changes you want, click Save.

Want a free Pipedrive setup guide specific to your business? Download it here.

Adding custom detail fields

Another area of Pipedrive that's incredibly valuable to customize is the detail fields.

Out of the box, Pipedrive comes with default detail fields for capturing information about your people, organizations, and deals. You'll likely want to customize what Pipedrive tracks, though, to capture data that's unique to your sales opportunities and type of business.

Collecting this information in detail fields instead of notes makes the data much more valuable to you.

Creating custom deal detail fields

1. Click your name in the top right corner of the screen and select Company settings from the dropdown menu.
2. In the menu on the left, click Data fields.
3. Click the green Add custom field button, then select Lead/Deal field.
4. In the dialog box that appears, create a field name that makes sense to your team, 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 a text field. This keeps the data clean and consistent and lets you make full use of Pipedrive's reporting features. Similarly, whenever possible, use a Single option or Multiple options field type rather than text. Again, this makes it much easier to build robust filters and reports.

Setting up your deal detail fields correctly transforms Pipedrive from a note-taking tool into a powerful information-gathering CRM. You'll be able to keep improving your sales process based on the data you collect.

Tips for more effective pipelines

Be clear in your language

Make sure each stage has a clearly defined beginning and end. For example:

• Meeting Scheduled
• Contract Sent
• Follow-Up Call Completed

Using the past tense leaves no room for doubt about when a Deal should be in a particular stage. Compare the above to less specific stage names like “Meeting” and “Contract.” Should a Deal be in the Contract stage when your sales rep is working on the contract? Once it's sent? Signed? Who's to say! Which is the exact ambiguity you want to remove from the process.

Don't have a Won or Lost stage

A common mistake companies make when setting up their pipeline is adding “Deal Won” and “Deal Lost” stages. For Pipedrive to be most effective, won and lost are 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. When you mark a deal as Won or Lost, it “disappears” from the default pipeline view, but you can always find it again using filters. You can even change your default pipeline view to include deals whose status is Won, Lost, or Open.

Review and revise

Pipedrive makes it easy to rename, delete, or add stages, so as you're getting started, remember that nothing is set in stone.

A couple of weeks in, check in with your team for feedback. Ask what's helping them move faster and if anything is slowing them down, and use that feedback as an opportunity to tighten up stage names, refine your data fields, and continue to move toward the most efficient and effective sales process possible.

Still stuck? Download your free Pipedrive setup guide here.