New: Updated Archiving for Leads and Deals
Managing deals and leads efficiently is key to staying focused and closing more sales, and now you can archive deals, ensuring you keep a clean workspace for the opportunities that matter. The option to archive leads has also been updated so that behavior is consistent for both leads and deals.
Highlights:
- Archive paused or inactive deals and leads, making your pipeline look cleaner and run faster.
- Archiving items isn’t permanent: you can unarchive an item to make it active again or delete it permanently.
- You can search for archived deals and leads. Archived items are labeled as such.
- Filters, reports and dashboards support archived items, though separately from non-archived leads.
- Editing is restricted for archived items except for permitted actions such as adding notes, sending emails, and changing visibility.
This feature is gradually rolling out to all companies, with general availability expected by the end of March 2025.
Comments
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Awesome function. What about the sales-cycle and time behind? how does the archived deals affect the sales cycle?
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Are any users allowed to achieve and unarchive?
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General availability expected by the end of March 2025. Well it's april and I don't see it in our Pipedrive environment. I'am the admin. When can we expect this to be active?
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What is the best practice for archiving a deal vs. marking it as lost?
Currently, if a prospect isn't responding or the timing isn't right, I lose the deal. And this feels appropriate because the deal is essentially lost at this point. If you re-engage the prospect later, you can reopen the deal.
I'm just not sure why I would archive a deal. I suspect a lot of salespeople will archive deals now instead of losing them in an attempt to make their conversion rates look better.
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Archiving is cool and yes, sales teams will love it. When sales cycles are very long (months to years), archiving allows you to put deals aside. They're not really lost. They just need to get out the pipeline for a while.
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@Paul Minors Couldn't agree more. Personally, I would think if the customer has put it on hold for a period of time due to other projects taking priority, then maybe archive, but the sales person must still put a task in to contact them down the track. But if someone has become un-responsive then it has to be lost.
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@MBrown thanks! Yeah, knowing how salespeople are, I feel they'll archive leads instead of losing them and this will result in inaccurate reporting (i.e. conversion rate). The way I see it, if someone tells you they're not interested right now and to reach out again later, usually this is a "soft no" and the deal should be lost. It can then be reopened again later if you reach back out and change their mind.
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Hi @wonders thank you for the feedback. I see that you have also engaged in the feedback post requesting that leads have a changelog, which has been sent over to our product team.
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@Manuel Oliveira If the idea of Archiving is to be able to reopen it later, versus Lost is more final.
Then, to maintain consistency, there should be an option to put Lost on leads as well.0 -
@Paul Minors We didn't lose any deals for April! We archived 120 deals but I'm sure these deals will close one day.
This definitely feels like there should be a setting to only allow won or lost deals to be archived.
I like having the separate list of Archived deals but really, I would love to be able to Archive deals to remove them from Search Results.
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@Guy Renko thanks for sharing. The way I see it, you must have lost some deals in April. Maybe some of them will come back and you may win a few of them in the future. But I'm sure a bunch of them are in fact truly lost. By archiving them, this skews your conversion reports to look better. This looks better for reporting purposes but you then don't have an accurate idea of what your conversion rate is.
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@Paul Minors I was just joking about the extreme way Archiving would be abused. No losses. Everything that would be marked Lost marked Archived instead.
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@Guy Renko ah, sorry I missed the sarcasm :P
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We have a whole bunch of applications for archiving deals. Given a very long sales cycle, some projects get "frozen" for half a year. We don't lose them, we just can't move forward for 6-12 months sometimes. Archiving them helps clean up the pipeline. Losing would mean losing previous communication history on the deal too - new deal, new history. It's a zero sum game when you lose old one and win the new deal too.
The feature is very helpful in certain cases.
Ensuring the sales team is using the feature properly is quite straightforward and more a matter of guidelines.
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@Nikolai Sokolov Deals postponed to an uncertain future 6-12 months, we put them as lost(with a reason "postponed decision") and only have a follow-up activity on them. If there later on when we re-pitch it becomes a new opportunity since the timing is better, we create a new deal. History can always be tracked from the Organization and Person -level. But this could be changed now with this feature..
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@Nikolai Sokolov Why not just "reopen" the inactive "lost" deals?
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@Guy Renko thats how we handled it previously. Archiving deals addresses this issue. The deal wasn't or isn't lost. It's just on hold. There are also instances when losing deals triggers automations. Archiving helps to avoid such problems, do not affect conversion and just "freeze" the deal.
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"There are also instances where losing deals trigger automations."
Thanks for the insight! This is a really interesting way to take advantage of Archiving.
The word "Freeze" is also an interesting way to look at the feature as "Archive" is worrying some people who think they'll forget all about the deal.
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