The Person and the Deal are the same thing to our business but PD doesn't handle this situation well
In our business the Person and the Deal are same thing (1 to 1) relationship. The problem we have is if we use Deals then the interface becomes very confusing because there are 2 places (that look very similar) where you add Activities. But only the Activities entered from the Deal are also added to the Person. Activities added to Person don't get linked to the Deal and there's no way to automate this linkage. So when looking at a Deal page view there are activities related to the Person/Deal combination that are missing (not acceptable). The other problem we have in trying to use Deals is the Person list view is commonly filtered to only show Persons with OPEN Deals but this isn't possible because the link from Person to Deal is very weak and these fields aren't available in the Person view list. These problems are forcing us to abandon the use of Deals all together and add custom fields to Person to handle the Deal function (Status, Stage, Lost Reason). These fields are the only thing missing from Person and the only thing we would want the Deal to provide but linking the Deal to the Person has many places where it breaks down. The interface in using Deals and Person is very confusing to users and it should be because there's a huge overlap of data and missing activity linkage and 2 places to do the same thing but the behavior is different depending on where it's done. The solution would be to allow activities to be auto linked to Deal if Person only has 1 Deal. We are able to automate the creation of the Deal when new Person is added and we use the ID of the Person to title the Deal and this works good but we can't automate the Activity/Deal linking when Activities are added from the Person side. The other issue we have is email can only be linked to the Person who has a matching email address in the To/From/CC/BCC. But we have internal emails related to Persons that we want linked to any Person - can't do it. We can link to a Deal that is linked to a Person but then we are confronted with the weak linkage between Person and Deal described above. Needless to say we are using lots of hacks and workarounds just because we need a clean 1 to 1 relationship between Person and Deal. I would think many companies just want to put the Person through a set of pipeline stages and this should be doable without creating a overly complicated and broken user experience.
Answers
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As a thumb rule, Person should contain information about the individual (email, phone, name, title, etc.).
Deal should contain information about the Deal based on what your business is offering.
It would be advisable to consult an expert to set up the system for you.
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Hello @Katie Shane, thank you for sharing this with us. If needed, you can also reach out to our Support team in order to help you out further, but as Amit said a partner can be your person too.
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@Katie Shane I would recommend reaching out the Pipedrive support as it sounds like your system may not be setup in the best way because it shouldn't (and isn't) be that complicated.
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