How to monitor your leads’ activity through Pipedrive CRM
By: Matt Pliszka
Tags: Sales, Marketing, Business, Pipedrive, CRM

This guide is the part of An Ultimate Guide to Integrating Your CRM to Grow Sales and Automate Work.

If you don’t know what is Pipedrive, yet, you can test Pipedrive CRM for extended 30 days (normally it’s 14) using this link.

Once you have your Pipedrive set up with your data imported into the system (data import) and your lead sources connected (CRM integrated with the website, mailing campaigns, customer service process) you’d now like to monitor how the leads progress through your sales process and how they respond to your campaigns.

Knowing how far you’re in the relationship with your prospects is essential to assess the chances of your sale’s success and to know which deals/prospects to focus on.

E.g. Let’s say you have 100+ deals in your pipeline but you only have 2–3 salespeople to handle the communication process. You’d rather have your team focus on the leads which have the highest probability to succeed (those that are the furthest in the sales process & show actual interest in your value proposition).

So how to do it properly in Pipedrive CRM with proper configuration & integration? Let’s take a look:

1. Configure sales process to actually reflect your relationships with customers.

A good first step to keep track of your leads’ activity is to properly set up the stages of your relationship with customers (pipeline stages). These should actually reflect the stages of your sales process.

Example stages in the sales process

Once you have it properly set up, it’s much easier to prioritize your tasks and sales process. Simply focus on the deals that are furthest in the pipeline (the closest to the right-hand side in the pipeline). Also, start any summary meeting and discussion with your sales team from the deals which are closest to the right-hand side.

2. Set up probabilities for sales stages to forecast sales for upcoming months/quarters.

Once you have your sales pipeline configured, it’s worth spending some time assessing what’s the probability of each lead passing through a specific stage of your sales pipeline. This will provide you with the actual sales forecast, letting you plan your sales ahead of time.

Probabilities’ setup in Pipedrive

Inputting probabilities at the very beginning of using a CRM will be difficult as you don’t really know what’s the chance of progressing the deal to the next stage. Once you have some data to analyze (actual sales data) it will become much easier. You will then simply enter actual conversion data or Pipedrive (unfortunately, Pipedrive will not recalculate it automatically for you).

Tip! Pipedrive will also allow you to override overall stages’ probability with individual deals’ probabilities if you feel a certain deal is more likely to progress to the next stage of the sales process.

3. Implement a “no red circle” policy and set up “rotting days”.

After you have your sales process defined and sales forecast implemented, you can now focus on progressing the deals to the next stages and on monitoring your or your salespeople's activities and interactions with potential customers.

A good first step to make sure you’re able to effectively monitor activities for deals in your sales pipeline is introducing a so-called “no-red-circle” policy which means that none of the deals in the pipeline can have an exclamation mark (meaning no activity planned) or a red circle mark (meaning an activity with overdue date).

Activity planning from the pipeline view in Pipedrive

This means all of your salespeople will need to actually report the activities they perform with leads in the CRM system. If any of the deals in the pipeline turns into a “red-circle” one, you can then set up a notification in Slack to notify your team about the need to execute or re-schedule the activity.

Also, if you’re in the industry with quick and intensive sales process (like retail), it’s good to set up a “deal rotting” making sure your deals cannot lag in your pipeline without any activity made for more than X days. Otherwise, they should be marked as lost.

Deal rotting notifications in Pipedrive

4. Integrate with lead activity software.

With the “no red-circle” policy in place, you can now monitor the activities/interactions of your team with prospects/potential customers. But how to make sure you then know what happens on the customer’s side? You can’t spy on them whenever they turn on the computer but there are some techniques you can use to know when customers are browsing through your offer, e-mail, or website.

Integrate with proposal software

If you integrate your Pipedrive with proposal software, like PandaDoc, you will then be able to know what happens once you send the proposal to the customer. This includes the number of times they open your proposal or the most often viewed parts of your offer. Also, you can set up an instant Slack notification every time a customer opens your proposal and have your team call your prospect exactly when they scroll through your offering.

Pipedrive & PandaDoc proposal software integration

Integrate with a lead scoring system

As Pipedrive does not have a built-in lead scoring system at the moment, you’d need to integrate it with a proper lead scoring solution like Salespanel to score leads based on multiple data collected in your CRM. The lead scoring solution will collect overall information about your leads’ activity, presenting you with a unified score reflecting your chance to close the sale with the customer.

Salespanel lead scoring in Pipedrive

Integrate with your website

After you send a proposal, it’s very likely that your prospect will be visiting your website checking on your value proposition, reviews, and many others. It’s good to know when somebody decides to visit your website after your email. By integrating with tech solutions like Leadworx or Outfunnel, you will easily check on the website visits of your potential customer.

Website tracking through Leadworx integration

5. Track your sales and marketing email opens and clicks.

Mailing remains one of the most important channels to communicate with your prospects. Hence, it’s important to know if your communication catches the eye of a potential customer.

Integrate with your newsletter campaigns

It’s essential to know if somebody opens your newsletters and it’s great to have this kind of information in your central CRM system (e.g. to catch the customer on the follow-up call). If you’re using MailChimp for emailing campaigns, you will easily stay up to date with your prospects opening or clicking on them, e.g. using an Outfunnel integration.

Newsletter & Pipedrive integration through Outfunnel

Integrate with your outbound campaigns

If you use outbound to reach out to potential prospects, you can also use a proper integration to know about your prospects opening on clicking on your outbound campaigns. Set up an integration with your CRM system and have your team react to any replies, clicks, or opens of your campaigns (you can use Slack notification as additional notification support).

Custom fields for cold mailing campaigns in Pipedrive

Make use of built-in Pipedrive’s mail tracking features

Pipedrive open and click tracking

Pipedrive will allow you to monitor clicks and opens for every email you send from Pipedrive CRM. Make use of this feature and monitor the status of your emails without the need to leave your CRM system. You can do it by marking a click and open icon whenever you send an email and by using a sales assistant every day you use your Pipedrive CRM.

Pipedrive sales assistant with open and click tracking

-> Learn how to integrate with mailing solutions and outbound campaigns in our guides on How to configure and use mailing in Pipedrive CRM and How to integrate Pipedrive CRM with cold emailing campaigns in 3 steps.

Monitor your leads’ activity and stay active in your sales process

Having the data about your leads and their activity in one central place will allow you to make data-driven decisions in your sales process. It will also help you focus on the leads in your pipeline which actually have a chance of closing instead of reaching out to each and every lead not interested in what you’re offering.

Integrating with all the lead activity happening in your business will also let you analyze the activity data and optimize your sales processes. However, we will look into data analytics in the next part of our guide.

For now, use the right tech setup and integration to your advantage and to improve your team’s sales efficiency.