Meeting/Activity linking pain
I've been really struggling with linking activities to deals in Pipedrive, I was wondering if I've missed something obvious or if this is structural limitation in Pipedrive that can or can't be fixed.
We're in a complex b2b sales environment, with many deals with multiple stakeholders, both within the same company as well as multiple companies present. If we setup a meeting and want to link this with the appropriate deals/contacts/companies, let's say 1 meeting may involve 2 deals A & B, 2 people C & D, from two organizations respectively, E & F.
- I have to go and manually link the meeting to C & D, this is not automatically picked up from the presence of the contact on the meeting participants. This should be done automatically and is a major irritation when it should be trivial to make work. Either extra time required or the meeting gets missed and we end up with an incomplete history. But I can successfully link both to the meeting
- It seems impossible to link two companies E & F to the meeting, despite two participants from E & F being present on the meeting. I can only add 1 company.
- Similarly I can only add one deal.
This is a major limitation. Whereas it should be easy (automatically or make it easy for us to do so) to link both the meeting and the meeting notes to the 6 different records, you can only easily achieve 50% with some work, and it becomes a highly manual process to link the rest. This magnifies as complexity goes up, e.g. a recent meeting we discussed 5 open deals in a meeting with 8 participants. The workload of syncing everything up by hand means this more often than not doesn't get done.
Any help or tips very welcome!
Answers
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This scenario arises quite often for us, in a variety of ways. Two easy to understand scenarios.
- A large engineering firm (ACME Group) has multiple projects in multiple territories, handled by their subsidiaries (ACME USA, ACME Deutschland, etc.). They have some central functions and strategic coordination of some key activities (e.g. product, r&d, etc), but devolved project engineering. We work with the central teams to gain strategic buy in and to be pushed down to subsidiaries' projects, but we end up defining deals and generating proposals on the project basis (ACME USA Project A, ACME Deutschland Project B). So a call with the central team may relate to multiple individual deals. (Another related bugbear with Pipedrive is the lack of easy aggregate reporting up to a parent company level - if we report on all active deals with ACME Group, we miss the aggregate contribution of open deals with ACME USA etc.)
- An end customer procures engineering equipment from multiple vendors (ACME USA, EngProducts USA), but has requirements which can be met by our product if it's integrated in the equipment supplied by both ACME USA and EngProducts USA. Thus multiple deals can be open, representing the open opportunities that both ACME and EngProducts has with the end customer, and which we would end up contracting with ACME and EngProducts, and not the end customer directly. A meeting with the end customer ("wouldn't it be good if ACME and EngProducts could supply you with our product already integrated?") thus relates potentially to multiple open deals associated.
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I've just been playing around with a Hubspot trial btw, and Hubspot just does this right - 1 meeting permits an arbitrary number of associations, automatically picked up from the calendar (as far as participants and companies goes), with a simple task of adding the appropriate (multiple) deals.
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@DanJ , thank you so much for providing more details. It sounds like you have needs that are beyond the functionality of Pipedrive. Hubspot and Salesforce would be a better fit in my opinion.
Something to consider with both these systems is that the added complexity can get out of hand quickly. Plan to have a Hubspot admin or Salesforce admin to help configure things, which can be an added investment $$$$.
Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions.
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