If you're not careful, working in sales can start to feel like high-stakes Whac-A-Mole. You're stuck in reactive mode and constantly responding to whatever pops up, whether it's a forgotten follow-up or an endless game of calendar tag with a lead. But in this case, instead of a few arcade tickets, you're risking your company's bottom line.
Pipedrive packs plenty of automated features to help get a little more control over your sales process. When you use its automation capabilities to their full potential, it can help you reclaim hours of lost productivity, tighten up your handoffs, and keep your team focused on actually closing deals.
To help you get started, we asked experienced Pipedrive users to share the automations that made the biggest difference in their workflow. Here are six smart ways to use Pipedrive automation to free up your time and speed up your pipeline.
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Automate demo scheduling and meeting preparation
When I was freelancing, I dreaded setting up an initial call with a prospective client. The scheduling back-and-forth turned what should have been a quick consultation into a weeks-long process. When your meeting cadence involves more than onboarding a client or two every few months, you can't rely on manual scheduling.
Automating your scheduling process doesn't just save time—it smooths the path for your prospects and makes sure momentum doesn't get lost. That's why Ryan T. Murphy, Sales Operations Manager at Upfront Operations, swears by using Pipedrive's meeting scheduling workflow.
Ryan explains, "When a deal moves to our 'Demo Requested' stage, Pipedrive automatically triggers an email with my Calendly link and simultaneously creates a task for the account owner to follow up if no meeting is booked within 24 hours. This eliminated the three-to-four emails typically needed to schedule demos, saving our team hours a week while increasing our demo show rate."
Ryan's improvements haven't stopped there. He's used Pipedrive's Zapier integration to generate personalized meeting agendas in Google Docs for every new appointment. Ryan says, "The document pulls information from custom fields in Pipedrive, ensuring our representatives walk into every call prepared with prospect-specific talking points. The key is identifying those annoying manual processes that interrupt your workflow momentum. For us, it was scheduling and prep work—two seemingly small tasks that, when automated, dramatically improved our pipeline velocity and conversion rates."
Here's a template you can use to put this same workflow to work for you.
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To get started with a Zap template—what we call our pre-made workflows—just click on the button. It only takes a few minutes to set up. You can read more about setting up Zaps here.
Implement a "lost deal" nurturing sequence
Just because a deal is marked as "lost" doesn't mean it's vanished onto a mysterious island that may or may not be purgatory. With the right automation, you can snatch those deals from the claws of a smoke monster and keep the conversation going.
"One of the most effective Pipedrive workflow automation strategies that has saved time and improved our sales process is automating follow-ups for lost deals," shares Akanksha Sharma, a sales expert at Botshot. "Sales teams often hear 'not now' instead of a definitive 'no.' Instead of manually tracking these leads, we automated a nurturing sequence. Here's how:
Marking a deal as 'Lost' triggers an automated email sequence through Pipedrive's native integrations (like Mailchimp or Outfunnel).
Deals are moved to a dedicated 'Lead Nurture' pipeline to re-engage prospects later.
Personalized, scheduled follow-ups ensure consistent touchpoints without additional manual effort.
This automation has boosted conversion rates by keeping potential clients engaged without the sales team spending extra hours on manual follow-ups," Akansksha says. "It also ensures no opportunity falls through the cracks."
Automate the customer success pipeline transition
Ideally, the handoff from sales to customer success should be smooth, predictable, and not require a dozen Slack messages to confirm someone's actually following up. In the real world, though, this handoff can feel a little more like doing a trust fall over a snake pit.
With a little automation, you can turn what's usually an unpredictable transition into a clean, scalable workflow, so no new customer gets ghosted before onboarding even begins. beehiiv's Head of Growth, Edward White, shares, "One Pipedrive automation that's been great for us is automatically transitioning deals from the main sales pipeline to a dedicated Customer Success or Account Management pipeline once they're marked as Won. This handoff used to be manual, and sometimes, new clients could get overlooked in the transition."
As for the specific configuration, Edward says, "We set up a simple Pipedrive workflow automation, available on their mid-tier plans, so that the moment a sales rep marks a deal 'Won,' Pipedrive automatically creates a new corresponding deal in our 'Customer Success' pipeline, pre-populated with the right information and assigned correctly. We want seamless, scalable transitions that leave no new customer behind. For us, the automation eliminated the manual handoff bottleneck and reduced the average time to kick off customer onboarding by nearly 24 hours."
Create location-based follow-up task automation
If your workflows cross borders or regulatory zones, automation can help your reps stay compliant without missing a beat. For example, the team at Swapped saved 4-6 hours weekly per salesperson by using Pipedrive to auto-create follow-up tasks triggered by deal stage movement and contact location.
CEO and blockchain security specialist Thomas Franklin explains, "If a deal moves into 'Verification Complete' and the client is in the EU, a task fires to send them KYC compliance forms tailored to their jurisdiction. No manual handoff. No forgetting. Just pure, structured speed. Once we rolled this out, our deal-to-close cycle dropped by 21%."
Thomas says, "To be honest, it's kind of like giving your reps an extra assistant. They don't waste brainpower remembering compliance steps, which means more focus on closing. If you're scaling across borders like we are, automation isn't just a productivity boost—it's how you maintain sanity."
Assign tasks automatically based on criteria
"You've got this, right?" is an awkward question when the check arrives at a group dinner—and it's almost as unforgivable when floating around in a fast-moving sales pipeline. Automating task assignment makes sure nothing slips through the cracks, no one's stepping on each other's toes, and everyone knows exactly what's on their plate.
Dirk Alshuth, the CMO of emma, shares, "Automating task assignment in Pipedrive has been a huge time-saver for our sales team. Before we set it up, we had to manually assign tasks to different team members, which could lead to delays and sometimes even errors. Now, with automation, tasks are automatically assigned based on specific criteria, like deal size or the stage of the sales process."
Now, Dirk says, they've built automations that route tasks based on things like deal size or sales stage. "For example, when a new deal enters the pipeline, Pipedrive automatically assigns it to the right salesperson depending on their expertise or the region they manage. This means there's no wasted time figuring out who should take the lead. As a result, our team can focus on what really matters, such as engaging with leads and closing deals. It's improved our sales process by making sure nothing falls through the cracks, and it's sped things up significantly. Furthermore, everyone knows exactly what they need to do without having to wait for manual assignments. It's a simple change, but it's saved us a ton of time and effort."
No more guessing games—just clean, efficient task ownership from the start. And because everyone's always clear on next steps, it keeps the whole process humming along without bottlenecks or back-and-forth.
Connect Pipedrive to your entire tech stack with Zapier
Manually entering data between tools is the business equivalent of me trying to recap a multi-part TikTok sketch from memory to my beleaguered partner—you're bound to forget something important, and everyone's slightly annoyed. The earlier you can automate early pipeline steps, the more headspace your team has for actual selling instead of trying to recall customer info (or in my case, a hilarious punchline).
Zapier's Pipedrive integrations can connect Pipedrive to your lead gen apps, scheduling software, database, and every other tool in your tech stack—using AI to qualify and enrich lead data along the way. That way, your CRM can handle the busywork, while you focus on the deals that actually move the needle.
Learn more about how to automate Pipedrive and sync data across your most-used business tools, or get started with one of these pre-built templates.
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Zapier is the leader in workflow automation—integrating with thousands of apps from partners like Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Use interfaces, data tables, and logic to build secure, automated systems for your business-critical workflows across your organization's technology stack. Learn more.
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