Pipedrive Activities: All You Need to Know in One Place
Pipedrive is a CRM platform that gives sales teams a visual, flexible way of working by incorporating pipelined activities that members can easily schedule, track, and manage. In addition to these activities, Pipedrive provides your team with smart features that make sales processes more efficient and fluid. In fact, by facilitating automation, activity generation, insights, and the added benefit of tool integration, Pipedrive allows your sales team to shine.
In this article, we explore the features of Pipedrive activities and how they can better help your sales organization.
So, what are Pipedrive activities?
Pipedrive activities are everything you schedule during the process of closing a deal. These may include anything from the phone calls you make with your clients, to reaching a project milestone. Indeed, you can also set dates and times for these activities, add important notes, and link them to your contacts, organizations, or deals.
Need to keep your clients in the loop? With Pipedrive, you can also send invites to your contacts to help them stay up to date with their appointments.
Types of activities
Pipedrive offers you several activities to meet your main requirements as well as the option to customize the activities that work best for your organization’s needs. These activities can be grouped into two categories, namely basic activities and custom activities.
Basic activities are those already offered by the Pipedrive CRM and assist you in closing off your deals.
- Calls: Organize your calls by scheduling the dates and times you need to contact a client.
- Meetings: Manage your meetings by setting up your preferred dates and times on your calendar.
- Deadlines: Set up notifications to keep track of the milestones you want to reach.
- Tasks: Construct and monitor the tasks you want to do on a daily or weekly basis.
- Emails: Set dates and times for your email notifications.
Custom activities are those you can create from your Pipedrive platform that may better suit your own way of working. You can give these activities custom names and link them to your deals or contacts.
Setting up your Pipedrive custom activities
To set up your custom activities go to the settings tab of your account. You can find this on the top right-hand side of the page, under your profile.
- Click on your profile picture => Company settings => select Activities.
- Select an activity type to add, name it, and click Save.
You can choose to customize your new activity by giving it a custom name and a custom image. The name can reflect any task, deadline, or other action that you need to complete. You can also return to this tab at any time, to edit, deactivate, or even rearrange your activities.
How to add an activity to your deals in Pipedrive?
There are three ways to add activities to your deals:
Add an activity via the Pipeline View
- Head over to your pipeline view in the Deals tab.
- Next, click the activity icon on one of your deals => Schedule an activity.
In the Schedule an activity window, you will see various fields: title, activity type, start and due date and time, etc. Fill out the necessary ones, then click Save to add the activity.
Add an activity to a deal via the detail view
Alternatively, you can add activities in the deal’s detail view. This view allows you to see everything pertaining to a deal, person, or organization.
- Open a deal => click on the Activity tab next to Notes.
Fill out the necessary fields and click Save to add your activity.
You can also add activities in the Activity menu. Click on the + Activity button.
Ensure that each activity is linked to the correct deal each time you add a new one. You can check and edit this in your Schedule an activity window, next to the paper clip symbol.
Schedule your activity and link it to a deal so that you can stay updated on all your relevant tasks and opportunities.
See all activities on a deal in Pipedrive
As a sales manager, it is essential for you to have an overview of all your activities on a deal. You can achieve this by first selecting the Deals tab in the Pipedrive menu.
Open a deal and in the deal’s Detail view, you can see all the activities related to it, including when they are planned or if they are completed. From this view, you can also edit your activities, delete them, or mark them as done.
Can you schedule Pipedrive recurring activities?
Many Pipedrive users need to schedule recurring activities – those that will be repeated every day, every week, or at another frequency. Unfortunately, this feature is currently not available. However, Pipedrive developers say that they have it in its beta testing phase, so you may expect it to be released very soon. This will allow sales teams and managers to reduce their manual workload. With the release, you will gain the advantage of quickly scheduling your recurring activities in advance.
How to add multiple activities to a deal in Pipedrive
Let’s say you want to add several activities to your deal; a call, follow-up, and meeting. All the aforementioned methods will do the job, but the best way is via a deal’s detail view.
Open your deal, click on the Activity tab and create a new activity. Then add another activity for the same deal. So, basically, you need to repeat the process as many times as the number of activities you want to add.
How to bulk add activities to Pipedrive
You can also add activities assigned to deals in bulk via importing them into Pipedrive from an external spreadsheet.
- Click on the More (…) button in the top-right corner and select Data import.
- On your computer, select a file with the data => then map the columns with your data. Pipedrive allows you to map your activities to Pipedrive data fields to create a standardized format and reduce errors. Ensure that the data is correct and proceed to Next to complete the import process.
Remember, there are some general rules that you should revise before importing your file:
- Prepare a spreadsheet externally with your new bulk activities, for example:
- Ensure that your spreadsheet is clean, well-formatted, and does not contain any formulas or special symbols.
- Limit your file size to 50MB and ensure that your row count is only up to 50,000 rows.
How to group activities in Pipedrive
If you are part of the Professional or Enterprise plan, you can collaborate on your activities as a group. The group activities Pipedrive feature enables you to invite members to your Pipedrive workspace. You can do this by clicking on the invite your team icon on the top right-hand side of the screen. In the box, you can invite members by typing their email addresses and clicking on Preview.
Before sending an invite, you can edit the permissions that each invitee will have while working with you. Select the box next to their email address to begin customizing the level of access each participant will need. Members can have admin, manager, or regular permissions. With regular permissions, a participant cannot have access to billing and security.
Pipedrive export activities
There are two native ways to manually export activities from Pipedrive:
- Export data – you can download information about your activities grouped by Due date, Date added, Date of last update, or Marked as done time as a CSV or Excel file.
- Export filter results – you can download information about a filtered set of activities as a CSV or Excel file.
The first two options are native, and we’ve explained how they work in detail in our Pipedrive Export Data Tutorial.
Automate exports of Pipedrive activities
However, if you need to automate exports of activities from Pipedrive, you can use a Pipedrive integration by Coupler.io.
Coupler.io is a data integration tool that pulls data from a specific source application and imports it to your destination program for further analysis, management, and reporting. It integrates with common data analysis and spreadsheet tools, Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, and Google BigQuery.
The Pipedrive integration allows you to automate exports of activities to the chosen destination on a custom schedule, for example, every hour from Tuesday to Thursday. Here is the flow to set it up:
- Sign up to Coupler.io with your Google or Microsoft account. You can also create a free account if you have a custom email address.
- Click Add importer and select the source app, Pipedrive, and destination app.
- Connect to your Pipedrive account, then select Activities as the data entity for export.
- Connect to the Google or Microsoft account, depending on the chosen destination app. If you’re exporting leads from Pipedrive to BigQuery, you’ll need to connect your BQ project.
- Select where to load your leads.
- Toggle on the Automatic data refresh and configure the schedule for your automated exports of activities.
Here is what your configured Pipedrive integration may look like:
Eventually, click Save and Run to load information about your Pipedrive activities.
Why automate exports of Pipedrive activities?
Although Pipedrive provides the Insights feature for reporting and analytics, its functionality is rather limited. For Activities analytics, you only have two types of reports: Activities performance and Emails performance.
These two reports are important for analyzing your activities and ensuring that they meet your required metrics. However, you can do a lot more with tools that help you build custom dashboards and reports outside of Pipedrive. For this reason, being able to export your data is crucial.
Coupler.io allows you to integrate with several tools, such as Google Sheets and Excel, that combine multiple entities to construct complex reports. When you ingest data into your spreadsheet, you can also do cross-data analysis, and build holistic reports from across multiple application domains.
Not to mention, Coupler.io allows you to automatically update and sync your data, by the use of its scheduler that pulls data periodically. For this reason, your data always contains the accuracy you need to measure sales KPIs, as well as activities performance from inception.
How to complete an activity
You can mark an activity as done by selecting the calendar icon in your Pipedrive platform or through the Activities menu. When you complete an activity and mark it as done, the activity is automatically removed from your list.
However, in order for each activity to be automatically updated and Marked as done, you must first specify its Due date. When you have completed said activity, simply mark it as done and Pipedrive will then scratch the activity off to illustrate that it is completed.
Below, we are going to look at how we can automate this function:
- Go to the Activities menu, then select an activity.
- In the Bulk edit window that appears to the right of the screen, go to the Due date field and select Edit current value.
- Click on the empty box that populates below to set the Due date in the calendar.
- Edit your Due time (optional). Lastly, click on Confirm.
To check your activities off as completed, you can head over to the Detail view of a chosen deal. Select the circle next to the activity in the PLANNED section:
Now your activity is Marked as done. If you wish to locate your done activities for reference, they can be found at the bottom of the same page, under the DONE section.
In your calendar view, you will see that the activities will always show based on their scheduled due date, regardless of if they are completed or not.
Whereas, in the Detail view, activities are ordered by Marked as done date. This means, that the activities you complete first will always be in chronological order in the Detail view.
Automate activities in Pipedrive
Daily activities like Call, Task, Meeting, Deadline, Email, etc. can be easily automated in Pipedrive. This basically means the tool will create an activity based on a trigger for users to follow those activities. You can set up which events are triggered based on specific actions that you would like to complete.
Therefore, as a sales manager who wants to send an email notification to a client every time an activity is completed, you can rest assured that automating this workflow will save you and your sales team time and money. Let’s take a look at how this can be accomplished.
How to set up Pipedrive automated activities
- Click on the More tab (…) on the Pipedrive menu.
- Select Workflow automation.
In the workflow automation tab, you can use various templates to set up a workflow that best suits your needs, whether it be creating activities when a deal is moved or completed, or when a lead label is updated. Select the necessary template from the Workflow Automation dashboard.
We are going to design a workflow that will create an Email activity each time a lead is updated in Pipedrive. When you select a template, configure Trigger and Event as to what activity you want to schedule.
- Click on the Created by me tab.
- On the right-hand side, click on Add custom workflow.
- Name your workflow and add a description if you prefer.
- Add your trigger event.
- Add the conditions in which your events will take place.
In this example, we would like to send an email every time a lead is updated.
- Save your changes.
Your new customized automated activity is ready.
Similarly, you have a variety of default workflows to choose from when it comes to creating your activities. Pipedrive allows you to manage all this under the Create activity template of the workflow automation window.
Automating your Pipedrive activities can do away with repetitive administrative tasks that your sales teams commonly deal with, allowing them to free up more resources.
Pipedrive activities in a nutshell
Pipedrive activities are not just an assisting feature, but a core data entity that allows you to optimize your work with Pipedrive on a daily basis. One of the main Pipedrive best practices is to start your day with your Activities page. Doing this lets you monitor that each deal on your pipeline has an activity scheduled so that you are well-organized for the day and the day after that. Pipedrive activities are like that to-do list that keeps you on track to completing your deals, not only more efficiently, but on time. Good luck and enjoy!
