Using the Pipedrive Products Feature to the Fullest
Compared to Salesforce or Zendesk, Pipedrive is noticeably smaller but still has all the essential CRM functionality, 24/7 support, and task management capabilities. Pipedrive’s true value, however, lies in the way it lets you monitor and visualize sales processes from start to finish.
Pipedrive Products is one of the features that makes it possible. Available across all subscription plans, it provides efficient means for tracking and managing your products and deals. Here is what you need to know to make the most out of Pipedrive Products.
Pipedrive Products: a brief overview
The Products tab located on the left part of the interface lets you create, review, edit, and manage goods and services. To enable this feature, you need to:
- Click on your name in the top right corner of the screen
- Select Tools and Integrations
- Click on the Products toggle to enable it
Notice that there are two more toggles below:
- Price variations is convenient for setting up subscription plans or distinguishing between regular and premium products
- Product durations lets you specify whether a product has the time or quantity limits
After you enable the Products feature in Settings, it becomes accessible from the panel on the left side of the screen.
How to use the products tab on Pipedrive
Pipedrive’s interface is minimalistic yet friendly to new users, so it should be easy for you to display your assortment in the system.
Creating a new product
To create a new product, click on the Products icon in the panel, and click on the green + Product button. You will see an Add product window with multiple fields that you can fill in:
- Name. This is how your product or service will be displayed in the CRM. Make the name unique and informative to avoid confusion as the number of products grows. This field is mandatory.
- Product code. A field for entering product IDs. This one is mandatory, too.
- Category. For easier management and navigation, your Pipedrive products fall into several categories that you can set up yourself. This field has a dropdown menu that is empty the first time you open it, and a search bar. To begin filling it up, simply type in its name into the bar and click on the blue + Add as a new category button below.
- Unit. Here you can set up standard measurements for the products or services you sell. Units can be both physical (piece, kilogram, centimeter, etc.) or non-physical (time, energy, money, etc).
- Unit prices. Set up your price per product unit. Pipedrive supports a wide range of national currencies. The CRM will automatically convert the value of your deals in different currencies to your default currency through their Open Exchange Rates partner.
- Tax %. Use this field to set up automatic tax exclusion.
- Visible to. Make a product visible to you alone, or your entire company. To do it, you need to set up visibility groups and subgroups first. We will cover this feature in more detail a bit later.
Here is how a filled product card looks in Pipedrive:
If the default fields are not enough or do not suit your needs perfectly, you can always tweak them or even create custom fields. To do this, go to Settings → Data fields.
The Add custom field button lets you create fields for leads/deals, people, organizations, and products. You can also set your custom fields’ properties here.
How to export and import products in Pipedrive
You can list hundreds or even thousands of products in Pipedrive. And while the CRM has all the necessary tools for reviewing and managing them within the system, it might use some additional options in terms of dashboarding, visualization, importing, and exporting.
The good news is that Pipedrive supports multiple app integrations to expand its functionality. For example, you can use Make to organize repeated, routine operations into streamlined workflows or Leadfeeder to track your potential leads more efficiently. To move data from Pipedrive, you can use Coupler.io – a simple yet effective data integration tool that can simplify the exporting process to mere clicks.
How to import your products to Pipedrive
Pipedrive supports importing in XLS, XLSX, and CSV. Before you proceed with the operation, here are some points to consider:
- Pipedrive can import spreadsheet files containing up to 50,000 rows and being up to 50 MB in size.
- If your spreadsheet has multiple tabs, it is better to import each tab as a separate file.
- It is recommended that you avoid formulas and special symbols in the documents you import to Pipedrive.
- Some fields are mandatory for a successful import, and must be included for each item:
| Entities for import | Mandatory fields |
|---|---|
| People | Person name (optionally, you can include their contact details such as a phone number or an email address) |
| Organization | Organization name |
| Products | Product name |
| Leads | – Lead title – Person or organization name |
| Deals | – Deal title – Any deal field – Person or organization name |
| Activities | Any activity field |
| Notes | – Note’s content – Deal, contact, or lead information |
Source: Pipedrive Help Center
After you have prepared all the spreadsheets for import, the rest of the procedure is simple:
- Click on the three dots in the bottom left corner of the screen and click on Import data, then select From a spreadsheet option.
- Match your spreadsheet columns (left) with the respective Pipedrive data fields (right). The CRM will recognize most fields automatically, but for the rest, manual mapping is required:
- Tell Pipedrive what it should do with possible duplicate data (if any): you can either merge it to create one record, or create separated records.
- Review the imported data and click on Start import.
After the import procedure is completed, you will see a confirmation screen. You will also be able to download skip files that have been generated during import. Pipedrive creates a skip file every time it attempts to import a spreadsheet item without a proper mandatory field.
How to export your products from Pipedrive
You can manually export all or filtered products from Pipedrive using the native exporting functionality. Or you can automate export Pipedrive to Excel on a schedule using the Pipedrive integration by Coupler.io. We‘ve blogged about this in our Pipedrive Export Data Tutorial.
For example, to export the information about a certain set of products, you first need to sort out all the items by selecting an appropriate filter.
Next, click on the three dots in the top right corner of the screen, and select Export filter results.
With Coupler, moving data out of Pipedrive looks like this:
- Sign up to Coupler.io, click on the Add importer button and select your source and target destinations:
- Connect your Pipedrive account, then select Products as a data entity.
- Connect to the destination app and configure the spreadsheet or table if you’re exporting data to BigQuery.
- Enable the automatic data refresh and set up frequency if you want to automate exports on a schedule.
Coupler.io supports Google Sheets, Excel, and BigQuery as the destination app, and lets you schedule data exports with zero coding knowledge.
How to review and update products in Pipedrive
Once you have listed all your products, your Products List screen will look something like this:
When your business grows and the number of items in the Products tab increases exponentially, convenient navigation becomes paramount. There are several ways in which you can sort and review your products:
Alphabetical filters
After you create a product, a filter button with the product name’s initial letter appears in the top left corner of the tab (under the green + Product button). Clicking on a letter will reveal a list of all products with names that start with this letter.
Custom filters
Clicking on your name in the top right corner of the tab will unfold a submenu with the + Add new filter button.
With its help, you can create any number of customized filters using a flexible system of parameters:
Product detail view
If you click on a product in your Products List, you will be able to review information on each particular item. You can also edit product details here.
Pressing on the pencil icon near the Details section will let you change the displayed fields.
Using the Customize fields button you can rearrange the order in which fields appear, and also add a new custom field to the product card.
The Participants and Followers fields reflect the information on the persons to contact regarding the product and other Pipedrive users who follow it.
The Prices tab to the right shows you:
- Unit price. The price of each unit of this product
- Cost per unit. The cost of each sold unit of the product.
- Direct cost. The cost of developing or producing one unit of the product
Deals let you review the information on the open, won, and lost deals linked to the product. You can change the order in which columns are displayed or export the info elsewhere using the gear icon and the Export button, respectively.
The Variations tab lets you split a product into several sub-products and set different prices for each of them.
The last tab is rather self-explanatory: you can upload files to your product card from your computer or using cloud storage.
How to add products to a deal in Pipedrive
There are two main ways how to attach Pipedrive products to deals.
From the deal details screen
When in your Deals tab, click on a deal’s name to view its details screen. Click on the Add products button under the deal’s name to connect it to a specific product.
From your Products List screen
When viewing your Products List, tick checkboxes to select the desired item(s). The green + Product button in the upper left corner will change to Add to deal. Click on it to link multiple products to a deal.
Pretty easy, as you can see.
Managing your Pipedrive products
After selecting one or several items, you will see the Bulk edit box pops up on the right side of the screen. This is one of the useful tools for managing your Pipedrive products, which we’ll now review.
Bulk edit
This tool allows you to edit multiple items on your Product List screen at once.
In particular, you can change the products:
- Name
- Owner
- Product code
- Current status (active or inactive)
- Visibility
- Units
- Tax percentage
Keep in mind that there is no Revert button for the changes you make via Bulk edit, meaning that if you make a mistake, you will have to re-select all the items and edit them once more. Also, the bulk editing process is rather slow, so if you change multiple items this way, it can take a while.
Managing the visibility of your products
You can choose whether to display or hide certain products from other Pipedrive users. To do this, you need to set up visibility groups first. You can do it via Settings → Manage users → Visibility groups.
Essential and Advanced subscription plan users have access to just two default visibility groups: Owners & Followers, and Entire company.
Professional and Enterprise users, however, have more options:
- Owner only. Only the owner of the product can see it in the system
- Owner’s visibility group. A product is visible to all members of a specific visibility group
- Owner’s group, and sub-groups. A product is visible to all users except those who have not been assigned to any visibility group
- Entire company. A product is visible to anyone
Note that visibility settings do not affect system administrators and members of the parent group.
Once you set up all visibility groups correctly, you can assign visibility status to any item in your Product List using the Bulk edit tool. You can also set visibility for each product individually, using the Visible-to option in the Product Detail view:
Manage and track your Pipedrive products as you wish
Pipedrive offers extensive and convenient functionality for managing your products and services. Lacking some features of bigger CRM systems such as Salesforce, Pipedrive is more intuitive and simple. It’s a CRM for smaller businesses focused on sales, and in this respect, Pipedrive shines. It allows you to create, manage, and edit hundreds of products easily, whereas app integrations such as Coupler.io can help you move large volumes of data to or from the CRM in just a couple of clicks.
