Knowledge Base

Your database is one of the most valuable resources within your company. However, it can be expected that some information will become outdated over time, and failing to maintain the health and quality of your database can cost your company money and clients.

Regular maintenance of your database, on the other hand, will increase focus and efficiency to achieve higher conversion rates. To help you accomplish this, here are some tips to free up space and keep your account running smoothly.

Deals

Deletion

This is the most effective way to free up space in your account. In Pipedrive, you can delete deals in the detail view and the list view.

If you need to delete deals in bulk, you can create and apply filters in the list view for the unnecessary deals you want to delete.

If you change your mind after deleting a deal, Pipedrive offers the option to reopen deleted deals.

The Rotten feature

This feature is designed to highlight the deals that have been idle in your pipeline for a long period of time. You can filter for rotten deals by creating and applying the following filter:

Once your rotten deals are filtered, you can either delete them or convert them to leads. This way, you'll get rid of all the idle deals in your pipeline at once.

You can learn how to configure the Rotten feature in this article.

Leads inbox

In your sales process, you may find yourself with many deals sitting in the early stages of your pipeline, not ready to move forward but also not cold enough to be lost or deleted. Pipedrive's Leads inbox is a separate inbox that can be helpful in these situations.

Let's say you have a group of deals that have been rotten for several weeks. You don't want to delete them, but you are unsure when you or your team will work on them. You have the option to convert them to leads to declutter your pipeline.

You can do this in the detail view individually:

Or you can convert deals to leads in bulk from the list view:

Once you convert your deals to leads, your pipeline will be cleaner, and you will have more space in your deal storage.

Deal status

By default, the pipeline view only focuses on open deals, meaning lost or won deals are not displayed. This doesn't mean that they are deleted.

Some customers create specific pipelines or stages for won or lost deals as they fear losing track of them and prefer to keep them open under these pipelines or stages.

Keeping won and lost deals open will affect your reports and statistics and be counted towards your deal storage. If your deals were already Won or Lost, we recommend marking them as Won or Lost accordingly.

They will no longer be visible in the pipeline view since, as we mentioned, the pipeline view shows only open deals by default, but they can be displayed at any time by applying a filter to show won or lost deals.

Managing duplicates

Given that the nature of sales is that you may have multiple deals with the same name, there is no automatic duplicate identifier for deals in Pipedrive. However, Pipedrive has a manual merging deals feature in case you come across duplicate deals.

On the detail view of the deal, click on more (...) and select "Merge".

The merge deals menu will be opened. Enter the deal title that you want to merge in the search bar at the top right corner and, once you select the deal to merge, you will see the information of both deals displayed.

Choose which information to keep in case of conflict on the banner at the bottom. Click on "Preview" and, if everything looks correct, proceed to merge, and you're done. Now you have removed duplicates and got more space for new deals.

Custom fields

Our custom fields feature is one of the many useful features to keep data organized. Nonetheless, the excessive use of custom fields can cause clutter in your workspace and distract you from focusing on the information that needs your immediate attention.

Overlapping custom fields

Some users create the same custom field for deals and contacts (people or organizations) to have that piece of information always visible in the detail view when opening either deals or contacts.

Creating a custom field twice can cause confusion and take up significant space in your custom field storage.

For example, users could create a multiple option field called "Source" in the lead, deal or person sections to identify the source the deal was obtained from.

Having this "Source" information visible when opening the contact or the deal linked to it may be important, but having two custom fields created with the same name could be confusing when filling out the fields.

To avoid this, we recommend you review the lead or deal, person, and organization sections in your data fields settings to see if there are fields that overlap and that you can delete.

In the example above, having one custom field created for contacts is the solution to the problem, as contact fields are visible in both deals and contacts.

Additionally, you can reorder your detail view sidebar sections and put the contact section at the top if you find it helpful.

For the time being, the only way to manually merge and change the type of custom fields is with the Pipedrive System ID feature. You can find a guide on how to do it in this article.

Notes section

Another recommendation is to add individual notes rather than create custom fields if there is information that can be included as a note. The size limit per note is approximately 3,000,000 characters (or 3MB), meaning that you'll have plenty of space to save data in this section.

An example could be a client visit checklist. If you need several pieces of information about the same topic to be registered within your deals, you can save them all together in a single note instead of creating several custom fields separately.

Also, you can export your notes whenever you need them. Learn more about exporting notes in this article.

Insights reports

Depending on your plan, you may have a limited number of reports on your account. By default, your account already has pre-made reports that we think could be important, but every company's needs are different and you may not be using all of them. You could have also created reports a while ago that you don't need anymore.

Making room for new reports is very easy. All you need to do is open the report from the list on the left, click on the more (...) icon, and then click on "Delete".

You can learn how to add new reports in our insights article.