Automate Your Professional Services Sales Workflow With PipeDrive, Ignition & Zapier
We zap at Blueprint Accounting
At Blueprint Accounting, we use Zapier extensively. We have several different apps integrated with Zapier, including: Ignition (of course), Pipedrive, Asana, Slack, Microsoft 365, and many others.
A lot of the zaps we are using revolve around removing recurring operational tasks from our day-to-day so that we can focus on client delivery. One of our zaps related to client onboarding has been featured in a webinar with Ignition and other posts by our industry peers (here’s one from Trent McLaren of Ignition).
As the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. We've saved hours in our sales process by integrating Ignition with Pipedrive (via Zapier). We've also got a consistent and powerful process that our clients love. To make your lives easier, I've broken down both our Pre-sale and Post-sale workflows we use at Blueprint Accounting.
Our Sales Workflow in Action
Before we dive into the details of how we've automated our sales workflow in PipeDrive and Ignition, I wanted to show you it in action. I recommend you watch this video first, and then down below, I'll show you exactly how to set it up in Zapier.
Introduction to Pipedrive
If you aren’t using a CRM, you’re failing at tracking your deals. It’s ultra important to know what’s in your pipeline of deals so you know where to focus your effort, who you’ve been in contact with, and what steps to take next to move a deal along your sales pipeline.
At Blueprint Accounting, we recently made the switch to Pipedrive. If you haven’t heard of Pipedrive, it’s quite an efficient tool, especially if you prefer a visual for your sales pipeline.
Pipedrive has some pretty amazing features that really stood out for us when evaluating CRMs.
1. Create goals for specific periods
Click on Progress > Goals. Once inside the Goals section of Pipedrive you can click on Add Goals (the big green button on the top-right). This will allow you to create a goal based on specific details. The details you need to decide on can vary greatly but have several categories (see first two screenshots below).
The final picture is a well-defined goal for you to track against. Each time you complete something related to the goal, you move closer to attaining that goal.
2. Link your email into Pipedrive to create deals
This is an excellent feature of any CRM system you choose. I would even go as far as to say a must-have. Having your email linked allows you to track all incoming and outgoing information related to a deal until it’s either closed as won or lost. This keeps your team in the know of what’s going on in the sales pipeline.
In the below screenshot, I sent myself an email so you can see what emails look like when they arrive in Pipedrive.
If you click on the email, you can see the entire message. You’re given the option to Create a New, or Add to an Existing, Contact. You can also click Create a Deal to place a deal in your pipeline from the email information.
3. Slick user interface to visualize your sales pipeline
From the minimalist colors, easily understandable icons and readable wording, to the customizable pipeline features, you can really see how Pipedrive’s user interface would be easy to pick up even if you didn’t go through their help section.
Triggers and Actions in Pipedrive
Being workflow aficionados, we really wanted a CRM that integrated with Zapier. Doing so allows us to integrate with thousands of other tools, Ignition being numero uno.
Before we jump into some of the workflows you can create, let’s review the triggers and actions within Pipedrive.
12 Triggers
Wow! 12 triggers in Pipedrive! My jaw dropped as I was taking this screenshot. That’s a lot of options to send information to other apps that you’re using.
12 Actions
Okay! 12 Actions, too! If you’re not already impressed with the number of Triggers and Actions, well, you should be. This leaves a lot of options to be imagined for moving information to and from Pipedrive.
But wait, there’s more…
5 search options
5 search options! If you’ve never used a search step, I highly recommend using them in the future. Generally, you’re able to do a search and create in one step because for the most part there is a check box to create one of the search fields if your search doesn’t find what it’s looking for.
As you can see, there are a lot of triggers, actions, and searches you can utilize with Pipedrive. This opens up a whole world of zaps. Let’s get the imagination flowing here so you can learn some slick workflows to help you better utilize the Pipedrive/Ignition integration through Zapier.
How to get information into Pipedrive
A very important part of being able to move information from one app to the other is actually having that information in the trigger app. In this case, and as you’ll see later, our trigger app for this specific topic will be Pipedrive and/or an accepted proposal in Ignition.
But how do you get prospective client information into Pipedrive in the first place?
There are many ways to do this. Almost innumerable based on the number of apps that can be integrated through Zapier. Of course, you can manually type the information in to Pipedrive, but that’s no fun. You should use Zapier!
Typeform for prospective clients
To make this easier for you, and give you an idea, Blueprint uses Typeform to gather prospective client information. Our current process is to send out a Typeform to each prospective client before we meet with them. This allows us to gather initial contact details and information about the individual we will be meeting with. It also helps guide the conversation during our free initial assessment so we can a) not waste either parties time, and b) understand better where the value might be in the engagement.
If you’ve ever used Typeform, you know how easy it is to create a questionnaire or survey to gather information. For us at Blueprint, we have pretty standard questions that you’d expect to see: first name, last name, email, phone number, etc. Then, by using Zapier, we’re able to push this information directly into Pipedrive and create a new deal at the beginning of our sales pipeline.
The zap for something like this would look like the below graphic.
In this zap, we’re taking information that is directly entered into Typeform by a prospective lead and zapping it to Pipedrive to create three things:
- The Person
- The Organization
- The Deal
The person, organization, and deal are the three most important things you need to capture on any prospective lead. Without them, you won’t understand the lead you’re talking to and your CRM won’t be updated with proper information that you need to gather.
Check out the video below, so you can see what resides in each of these tasks in the zap screenshot above.