The beauty of pipes is we rarely notice them. When they do their job, they do all the work for us, fading into the background while we focus on more important work. Pipedrive works on that same principle. As a task manager for your sales team, it can filter leads through a predetermined system of "pipes" filtering every lead to the appropriate place.

Pipedrive is a CRM (customer relationship management) system that works like a productivity task manager. You can set up pipeline "stages" to organize your inbound sales leads. By organizing every lead's sales process into a single dashboard, you can measure your results, see where you're losing prospects, and optimize your sales to fit the best strategy that works for you.

Paired with Zapier, this whole system runs on autopilot. You can integrate your Pipedrive into other popular apps: sync with Calendly to get on the same page with prospects, or connect with Google Sheets for a top-down overview of your entire sales roster. After all, the only thing better than a new sale is a sale that took place almost automatically. Here's how to set it up.

Table of contents

• Connect Pipedrive to your lead generation tools

• Connect Pipedrive to your calendar or scheduling app

• Use webhooks with Pipedrive

• Connect Pipedrive with Google Sheets

• Send notifications for new Pipedrive deals

Connect Pipedrive to your lead generation tools

Every campaign's gotta start somewhere. In Pipedrive, you can create "deals," "persons" (i.e., customers), and "leads" and start segmenting them to the appropriate sales funnel. The point when you meet a potential customer is a critical introduction: how you take this first step will reflect on your entire business.

That's why it makes sense to automate it. If you reach out to a potential lead almost as soon as they sign up, it shows your prospects that your business is on the ball. They don't have to know that you've set it up to happen automatically.

Integrate your favorite lead generation tools here. Facebook Lead Ads, for example, creates an instant sign-up form where Facebook leads don't have to leave the platform. This means Facebook users will have a near-frictionless experience when they sign up as one of your potential leads. Set that as a trigger for a new lead in Pipedrive, and you're off to the races. 

But you don't have to limit yourself to Lead Ads. If you use a form app to collect information from interested prospects, you can set the same automation with Pipedrive and kick off the sales process.

Connect Pipedrive with your favorite scheduling app

Say a lead wants to take it to the next step. Maybe you know from using Pipedrive and reviewing the stats that once one of your salespeople gets them on a call, you're halfway to the sale. Great! But since this step is so critical, there shouldn't be any friction between a lead signing up for a phone meeting and scheduling it. It needs to be fast and seamless.

Plug leads from your calendar and scheduling app into Pipedrive and start the same process. They're no longer random people from the Internet who clicked on your Calendly link. Once they set up the meeting by entering in the required information, you can use that same information to plug into Pipedrive and create a deal. Now every new meeting hits a milestone within Pipedrive. 

Once it's there, you can measure your efficiency with phone meetings vs. other lead-generation tools. And as the old saying in business goes, you can only manage what you can measure. Get it all into Pipedrive and measure your progress on every sale.

Use webhooks to fill in the gaps

No one likes a leaky pipe. Maybe you're not seeing the app you want to use here just yet. Fortunately, you can use Webhooks by Zapier to fill in the automation gaps.

You can use webhooks to add automation to apps that might have it built in natively. Use a catch hook trigger with the webhooks app and you can send information straight to Pipedrive from an app that doesn't have a Zapier integration.

It's an easy way to plug that leaky pipe and route all the information you need back to Pipedrive.

Connect Pipedrive with Google Sheets

Google Sheets makes for great record-keeping. Not only does it allow easy searching through vast swaths of well-organized data, but you can plug Google Sheets into other apps and build automation from it. Think of it as a control panel in your ability to automate data, including sales data you want to route to and from Pipedrive.

Set Pipedrive filters for specific deals and you can log them in separate Google Sheets for easy tracking. And once you have them in Google Sheets, you can monitor your sales team's progress. It's a great way to create a bird's-eye view of your overall data.

If you store customer data in Google Sheets—maybe you route your lead info from multiple apps into one spreadsheet for easy tracking—you can also use a Zap to easily send that info to Pipedrive each time you add a new row to your sheet.

Send notifications for new Pipedrive deals

Your sales pipeline won't get very far if no one knows what's happening as a lead moves through it. Fortunately, you can automatically send notifications to Gmail or Slack to alert team members once a lead's moved through the system. 

Maybe a deal comes your way that matches a pre-defined filter you set within Pipedrive. Or maybe a lead moves to the next "deal stage" within Pipedrive, suggesting they're ready for a follow-up. Hook it up to Slack or Gmail, and you can assign a team member without lifting a finger.

Turn the pipes on in your sales process

If your sales CRM can function like a system of pipes, then it should be just as automatic. 

But while Pipedrive has plenty of internal features for moving prospects from leads to customers, you'll have other apps that deserve a say, too. Link them together with automation to organize your data, sync your records, and scale your business.

And this is just the start of what you can do with Pipedrive and Zapier. What will you automate first?