Make Sure Your Sales Data is Consistent and Accurate with the New Required Fields Feature

Consistent sales data is a vital part of an effective sales process. With required fields, you can ensure that the data your team enters into Pipedrive is complete and accurate and that deals only move to the next pipeline stage when they have the required information.

We know how vital it is for our users to have clear and accurate data in Pipedrive as, without a consistent approach to data entry and naming conventions, your pipeline becomes disorganized and it can be easy to miss sales opportunities.

That’s why we’ve introduced required fields to deal, person and organization entries.

Now, Pipedrive admins can make it a requirement for users in their team to fill in specific fields when adding a deal, person or organization to Pipedrive, or when moving to a specific stage in your pipeline. Users can even make it a requirement for users to fill any custom field that they have created.

For example, a business vehicle insurance company could add a custom field for the number of vehicles in a lead’s fleet and then make this a required field, enabling users to easily see the potential value of the deal as soon as the lead has entered the pipeline.

Alternatively, if you have one sales rep responsible for lead qualification and another responsible for cold calling these qualified leads, you could make phone number a required field before the first rep can move their leads to the cold calling stage in your pipeline.

The advantages of having consistent data

The required fields feature could benefit you in a number of different ways. There are the obvious benefits, including making data easy to access and understand for your team, but there are many others as well, including:

• Leadership can establish a standard of data quality for your sales organization
• Your sales reps can better anticipate when their deals are ready to be moved to the next stage
• It also helps them understand what information they need from leads, streamlining the qualification process
• It’s easier for other teams in your company that rely on sales data to find the information they need
• Data analysis and sales forecasting are more reliable, as all the deals in the pipeline contain the same information

How to set up required fields

Setting up required fields is simple.

• If you’re an admin, navigate to ‘Settings’ and then select ‘Data fields’
• In the ‘Edit field’ view, there is a switch to turn required fields on or off.
• When switched on, your pipelines and stages will appear below the switch, with tick boxes allowing you to mark when fields are required

If a member of your team misses any required fields when adding a deal, person or organization, the box will be highlighted red and the field will be marked as required. The user won’t be able to save the entry until they have filled in all required fields.

You can also mark fields as ‘important’ if you want the field filled in at some point, but don’t want to prevent your team from being able to add new deals, people or organizations if they don’t have all the necessary information.

We will be rolling the required fields feature out gradually to Pipedrive users on the Professional and Enterprise plans over the next few weeks. It will not be available on the Essential and Advanced plans. You can find out more about this feature in the required fields article on our Knowledge Base.

If you are not a Pipedrive user, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial.

This article was published on June 16, 2020. Product descriptions were correct at the time of publishing.