Organizing your leads, deals, contact people, organizations, activities and emails is essential to your sales process. Pipedrive helps you to organize all of your items while allowing you to link them together for better visibility.
Leads #
At the beginning of your sales process, you may have potential deals sitting in your pipeline that you are not ready to start working on yet.
Pipedrive’s Leads Inbox is a separate inbox to keep your prequalified leads in before they become deals. Once you decide which leads can be qualified, you can easily convert them to deals and add them directly into your pipeline. You can read more information about our Leads Inbox in this article.
- You can add leads by spreadsheet import by clicking the “Add lead” button or via LeadBooster.
- When adding a lead through the add lead dialog, all fields are optional except either the organization name or the person name.
- The order of the leads in your Leads Inbox is determined by the activity status of each lead with leads needing the most urgent attention at the top and the lowest urgency at the bottom.
- When you’ve qualified the lead and are ready to pursue it as a deal in your pipeline, you can click “Convert to deal”. This will bring you to a new dialog, where you can define the pipeline, visibility and value of your new deal.
Deals
#
The ongoing transaction you are pursuing with a person or organization in Pipedrive is tracked as a deal, which is processed through the stages of your pipeline until it is either won or lost.
In Pipedrive, deals contain all of the actions taken towards the closing of a sale. Deals will also pull all information from the person or organization that they are associated with, which you can find in the detail view of that deal. In this article, you can read more about deals in Pipedrive.
- Deals can be associated with a person and/or an organization.
- Deals track all events and movements that take place throughout your sales process.
- Since a deal is connected to a contact, any actions you perform on the deal will also be associated with the person/organization related to it.
- Deals can be imported from a previous CRM or imported from a CSV or XLS file.
- The progress of the deals in your account is tracked as progress in your account.
People (contacts) #
People contacts are the specific customers that you are selling to from Pipedrive. Any information relating to each contact such as scheduled activities or emails will be tracked in the detail view of that person.
- People contacts can be linked to one organization.
- They can have multiple deals open for them at the same time.
- Your people contacts can be synced with your contact provider, imported from a previous CRM, or imported from a CSV or XLS file.
Organizations (contacts) #
Organizations are usually the companies that contact people work at. All of the people related to an organization will be listed in its detail view, along with any notes or activities linked to any people or deals related to the organization.
- Organizations contain information like a mailing address or industry information.
- You can link multiple people to your organizations.
- They can have multiple deals open for an organization
- Organizations can be synced with your contact provider, imported from a previous CRM, or imported from a CSV or XLS file.
Activities #

An activity represents any action on your part towards the closing of a sale. It can be a phone call, a lunch meeting, or any other event you schedule with a contact. You can schedule activities in relation to a person, organization, or a deal.

- Your activities can be synced with several calendar providers.
- Activities can be associated with both a person and an organization.
- Associating an activity with a deal will also associate the activity with the deal’s assigned person and/or organization.
- Activities can be imported from a previous CRM or imported from a CSV or XLS file.

Mail #

The mail tab of your Pipedrive account holds all emails that you decide to keep a record of in Pipedrive. Your mail is tracked along with your people and deals through Pipedrive’s email sync if you are on the advanced, professional, or enterprise plans. On our Essential plan, you can use Pipedrive’s Smart Bcc.
- If the person you have emailed exists in Pipedrive, the email will be associated with them. If the person does not exist yet in Pipedrive, the email will create a new person and link that email thread to them.
- Replies from your contacts will be forwarded to your Pipedrive mailbox, and Pipedrive will document them in the same email thread as a reply from the customer.
- Attachments in emails are available everywhere the email is associated and are also available in the files tab of any detail page.
- If a deal is open for the contact to whom the email has been sent, Pipedrive will associate the email thread with the person as well as the open deal.

Note: If multiple deals are open for a person who has been sent an email, Pipedrive will provide a list of all open deals for that person, and allow you to choose which deal to associate with the email.
Data relationships #
Here’s a basic rundown of how the different data types relate.
Leads | Deals | Leads represent potential deals that have not been fully vetted. Once a lead is vetted, it can be converted into a deal and added to your deals pipeline. |
Contacts | Leads/deals/activities/mail | Contacts are those you conduct deals and schedule activities with, as well as send emails to. They can be represented as individual people (i.e Steve Johnson,) or collective organizations (i.e The Steve Factory.) |
Activities | Leads/deals/contacts | Activities can be linked to a lead, deal, or contact, but it’s not required as they can also be created without being linked to other data. |
Leads/deals/contacts | Emails can be sent from or linked to leads, deals, or contacts if email sync is enabled. An email sent to an address already linked to a contact will automatically be saved there if the email address is only linked to one contact. If you don’t have email sync, you can still link emails to your leads, deals, and contacts using the Smart BCC link. |