A lot of salespeople feel like their CRM is slowing them down.
In this post I'm going to share the Pipedrive daily routine I've refined over the last 11 years that has helped me to close more sales. This is an update to a video I published almost five years ago that helped almost 19,000 Pipedrive users. Since then my team has grown, my process has changed quite a bit
I start my day in reactive mode
By reactive I basically mean I answer my email. I'm in New Zealand, and a lot of the sales prospects I'm talking to are in the United States. In the morning my inbox is often full of sales-related emails. For you that might come at various times, or you may want to use it as way to kick off your day.
When I receive an email about an existing deal, my very first step is to open Pipedrive and bring up that deal. Then I'm going to make any necessary updates.
So in this case that might mean changing a custom field because a trial is now active and I want to log the subscription date as being in one week. If I'm pretty certain, or I've got more confidence that the deal is going to close, I may choose to update my expected close date. I might need to update the stage of the deal. And I'll set an activity for myself so I know what to do next.
So essentially I'm updating the deal with any new information I've received. I've set my next action and I've kept the deal as up to date as possible.
Then I'll respond to the email. Because I have my Gmail account synced with Pipedrive, I can compose and send emails directly from the deal. It doesn't matter whether I reply from Gmail or from inside Pipedrive. Either option is fine because the conversation is linked to the deal.
My team and I are often communicating in Pipedrive as well. If Liam on my team responds to one of my comments on a deal, Pipedrive sends me a notification. I click through, Pipedrive opens the relevant deal, and we continue the conversation right there. We're confirming what each of us is doing, how a project is going to work, answering questions, giving feedback. We keep all of our conversations linked to the deal so whenever we need to we can look back and see what we've talked about on a particular opportunity.
The other reactive task I handle in the morning is new inquiries from the contact form on our website. My next action is to open Pipedrive, hit the Quick Add button, create a new deal, and fill in all the information. I put the deal into the prospect stage. My next stage is to get them to book a meeting. So I've responded, I've asked them to book a call, and I've set an activity to follow up and make sure they do. The deal is set up and I'm ready to go.
So that's the start of my day. Very reactive.
Keep Pipedrive open on your computer
The key thing here is keep Pipedrive open on your computer. That way it's quickly accessible throughout the day. When I'm responding to emails or if I receive a phone call, I can quickly pull it up, look at the deal, make my updates, and I'm keeping everything up to date in real time.
Where I see a lot of salespeople get hung up is they're doing their work, they're responding to their emails, having their meetings, and then they kind of get to Pipedrive at the end of the day and go, oh, I've got to update my CRM.
It's much better to keep it open and keep it up to date in real time. That way it's not a chore to update later on.
Then I switch to proactive mode
This is where I start doing my proactive sales follow-up, and to do that I work from the activities page.
A best practice I always talk about: you've got to have some kind of next activity scheduled on every single one of your deals. Earlier in this post I walked through setting an activity to follow up and get a prospect to book an introductory call. Because I'm setting those next activities every day, when I come to my activities page I can see exactly what I need to do today and who I'm following up with.
A couple of ways I've customised this page to work for me.
Firstly, I've created a filter so I only see activities that are incomplete. The filter shows me any activity that is still to do, where the assigned user is the current user, and the activity due date is today. As I complete an activity it disappears from view. It keeps the screen really clean.
Secondly, I have the full-screen deal view turned on. So when I click the deal name from my activities list, the deal slides in alongside the list. I can still see my activities in the background but the deal is right there and I can do my next action without going anywhere.
So in practice I click into a deal, I reply to the last email using a response I've pre-prepared, click send, mark the activity as done, and set my next activity. Then I close the deal and go back to my activities list. I keep working through my activities as much as I can.
For each activity I complete I always set my next action. That way I always have some kind of reminder of what I can do next to move the deal forward.
If you can master this habit you will be in the top 5% of Pipedrive users, and I guarantee you'll close more deals because fewer opportunities will fall through the cracks.
Meetings: before, during, and after
Introductory calls, demos, follow-up conversations. These meetings really do make up a huge part of the type of selling that we do.
I use Pipedrive to prepare for my meetings and to keep my notes, which are going to help me later.
Before a call I'll have prep notes in the deal. That might be bullet points the prospect sent me ahead of time, questions or things I want to cover on the call. During the call I take my own notes on what's standing out to me, what I'm hearing that's important. Even though we do get Zoom AI summaries now, I like to write my own notes. I keep everything in there.
We use Zapier connected to our Zoom account. So when we finish a meeting, Zoom generates a nice summary. Zapier automatically pulls that summary into the deal. So we've got that easily to refer to as well.
After the meeting I'll send a follow-up email, either by starting a new conversation or responding to one that's already in progress. I'll use the Pipedrive email templates I've pre-written. If I'm starting a new trial I can use that template, make any tweaks or changes I need to, and click send.
My recommendation is to send emails from Pipedrive first. Even if I then respond later in Gmail or Outlook, by sending that first email from Pipedrive the conversation is now synced with the deal.
Why keeping your deals up to date matters more than ever
A common theme of this post has been just keep putting information into Pipedrive. Write notes on your activities. Put your meeting summaries in here. Keep your emails synced with the deal.
Part of that is obviously useful for me to look at and refer back to. But now with AI it matters even more.
We've built our own Pipedrive MCP and we're using Claude to create quotes and proposals. Claude has access to the templates we like to use. It can then read the notes on the deal, the emails, all the information that's on that deal, and it can write a really good proposal. It probably gets us 80 to 90% of the way there. We then go in and make any tweaks and edits we like before sending it off. It is saving us a huge amount of time.
But for Claude to do a good job, it has to have context. That's why we are so diligent on keeping these deals up to date.
Weekly pipeline review
This one is not really a daily habit. It's more of a weekly habit that myself and Andrew, our sales manager, follow. We review our pipeline together. We want to keep the pipeline really clean and up to date.
Number one, we check that the deals our team is working on have activities that are current. We try to avoid having lots of red overdue activities. A seven-week overdue activity is not good. That deal needs to be followed up on immediately. We like the green ones, activities that are due today, or the grey ones that are scheduled in the future.
Part of the weekly review is Andrew will go through the deals that look really promising, read through the emails and notes, and then ask questions or provide feedback via the notes directly in Pipedrive. So he can tag me or whoever is managing that deal and say, hey, I noticed the client asked for X, I suggest you handle it this way, or here's how we should deal with that objection. It's a great way for sales managers to coach the team directly in the CRM.
During that weekly review we also lose any deals that are going stale or that we don't think are going to proceed. Often people are apprehensive about losing deals. It feels like you've failed. But I actually think it's an important thing to do. Number one, so that you prioritise the good opportunities that deserve your attention. And number two, it keeps the pipeline clean so you're looking at a really healthy sales pipeline.
When we do close a deal and get paid, we mark it as won. We also use the installments feature in the products section to set up payment dates for when customers are due to pay us for a project.
Contact timeline for existing customers
On a fortnightly or monthly basis we review the contact timeline. This is on the contacts page and it gives you a really visual way of seeing when you last made contact. When was the last email sent. When was the last phone call made.
I love this view. It gives you a really visual way of seeing at a glance who you haven't been in touch with recently. We use it to make sure we're touching base with customers on a regular basis and nurturing those ongoing relationships.
The more consistent you are, the better the CRM works for you
The more consistent you can be at keeping your CRM up to date and building these habits, the better the CRM will be. The more up to date it will be, the better quality reporting you'll have, the more context you'll have to give to an AI, and the less friction you create. Because everything's up to date and you can actually spend more time selling and less time working out what did we talk about last time, or what am I doing next.
Because the CRM is now working for you.
If you have any questions, leave a comment on the video or reach out via email. And if you want to see the full walkthrough, watch the video here.
Frequently Asked Questions
How should I start my day in Pipedrive? Start in reactive mode. Check your inbox and for each sales-related email, open Pipedrive and update the relevant deal. Change any custom fields, update the expected close date if needed, move the pipeline stage, and set your next activity. Then reply to the email, either from Gmail or directly from Pipedrive.
Why should I keep Pipedrive open all day? Keeping Pipedrive open means you update deals in real time instead of catching up at the end of the day. That way it's not a chore to update later on and your pipeline stays accurate throughout the day.
How do I use the Pipedrive activities page effectively? Set a custom filter to show only your incomplete activities due today. Turn on the full-screen deal view so you can open a deal alongside the activity list. Work through your list, complete each activity, send your follow-up, mark it done, and set the next activity before moving on.
Should I send emails from Pipedrive or my email client? Send the first email in any thread from Pipedrive. That links the conversation to the deal. After that, replies from Gmail or Outlook are fine. They will sync automatically because the thread is already connected.
How do I use Pipedrive for meeting prep? Add prep notes to the deal before the call. Questions to cover, anything the prospect shared in advance. During the call, write your own notes on what stands out and what you are hearing that is important. If you use Zoom, connect it via Zapier to pull the AI summary into the deal automatically after the meeting ends.
Why is keeping Pipedrive up to date important for AI tools? AI tools that read your deal data can only do a good job if they have context. Notes, emails, and meeting summaries are what the AI reads to write a proposal. No context, no useful output.
How often should I review my pipeline? A weekly review with your sales manager is a solid baseline. Check for overdue activities, review high-potential deals, provide coaching feedback directly in the deal notes, and lose any stale deals. For existing customers, a fortnightly or monthly check of the contact timeline keeps those relationships from going cold.