The starting point
Medres sells and distributes medical products across borders. The sales process was real and it worked. It simply was not written down anywhere. Who to call after a first meeting, what a distributor needs before it commits, which regulatory step holds up a shipment: that was knowledge held by the people doing the job. It survived a busy week. It did not survive absence, handover or growth.
Tribal knowledge is not a technology problem, and no CRM fixes it by being switched on. What a CRM can do is force that knowledge into a shape everyone reads the same way. That was the assignment. We design the full Pipedrive setup from scratch: pipeline architecture, custom fields, automation rules and management reporting.
Why a regulated international distributor is not a normal sales team
Most sales teams sell one thing, into one market, under one set of rules. A medical distributor does not. The same product line reaches different countries under different registrations, the buyer is frequently not the user, and a deal can be commercially agreed and still not shippable because a registration is pending or a territory is already committed elsewhere.
That changes what the CRM has to hold. A generic pipeline records a value and a close date. A distribution pipeline also records what is being sold, where it may be sold, who may sell it there, and what regulatory state that combination is in. When those facts live in email threads, the pipeline is a guess with a currency symbol in front of it.
It also changes what a stage means. In a normal team a stage is a proxy for buyer enthusiasm. Here it has to survive a question like "which deals are commercially closed but blocked on paperwork". That has an answer only if somebody designed the stages to give one.
The pipeline we designed
We design the main pipeline around how Medres actually sells, from first contact through negotiation to closed deal. That reads as obvious and it is not what usually happens. The common failure is a template pipeline whose stages describe an idealised process nobody follows. Sellers then park deals in whichever stage is least likely to trigger a question.
We write clear stage definitions with exit criteria. Each stage states what must be true before a deal moves forward. Not an opinion, a fact: something sent, agreed, confirmed or documented. So every seller knows when a deal advances, and two people looking at the same deal land in the same place. Exit criteria convert a judgement call into a check.
A second pipeline for international expansion
We build a separate pipeline for international expansion accounts. Strategic opportunities run on a different clock than daily orders. Opening a territory or setting up a distributor partnership takes a long time and involves steps that have nothing to do with a normal sale.
Kept in one pipeline, those deals do two kinds of damage. They distort the numbers, since a slow strategic conversation parked in an early stage drags every average with it. And they get neglected, because the operational pipeline is where the pressure is, and attention follows pressure.
Separating them lets management look at expansion on its own terms while the operational pipeline stays a picture of the running business. Pipeline count is a design decision, a point we develop in the CRM data model.
The fields we configured
We configure deal and contact fields specific to medical distribution: product categories, regulatory status, territory and distributor tier. Each one exists because the business was already asking that question in meetings and answering it from memory.
Product category makes the mix visible. Regulatory status makes the blocked deals visible, which is the difference between a forecast and a wish. Territory makes coverage and overlap visible. Distributor tier keeps a first order from a small reseller from reading as the same event as a first order from a primary regional partner.
We keep field lists short on purpose. Fields nobody fills in are worse than no fields at all, because reports built on them look complete and are not. A field earns its place by being used in a report, a filter or an automation.
Automation and management reporting
We configure automation rules so the process holds itself up instead of depending on somebody remembering it. Follow ups get created rather than recalled. Data required at a stage boundary gets enforced there. Ownership and next steps end up on the record rather than in one person's calendar.
Management reporting sits on top of that structure, and only works in that order. Reporting is a consequence of the data model, never a replacement for it. Dashboards over a pipeline without exit criteria produce confident charts about nothing. How we approach that layer is set out in dashboards and reporting.
What we deliberately left out
The project ran to a tight deadline and was delivered inside it. Meeting a date like that means saying no to things, and it is worth being specific about what we said no to.
We scoped the build around the sales process. Deep integrations into logistics and regulatory systems were not part of it. Regulatory status is a field a person maintains, not a value synced from a registration database. That is a trade, not an oversight: a wrong value that looks automatic is trusted far more than a wrong value somebody typed, so a sync designed in a hurry is worse than no sync. When that link becomes worth building, the route is the ordinary one described in API tokens and webhooks.
We also left out field sprawl. On a domain this specific it is tempting to model every product attribute and registration in the CRM. A CRM that tries to be a regulatory database is a bad one and stops being a good CRM.
What Medres said about the work
The review below is on the Pipedrive Marketplace listing, quoted word for word. It is one of the 11 reviews behind the 5.0 rating on that listing. The rest are on our reviews page.
“Sander and the Sales Surge team delivered an exceptional Pipedrive implementation for Medres. On a compressed timeline, they communicated clearly, stayed highly organized, and executed with precision. The project was completed on time and exceeded expectations.”
What to take from this case
The table below separates what was specific to Medres from what carries over to other teams. It adds nothing to the facts above. It only sorts them.
| Problem | What we did | Carries over when |
|---|---|---|
| Process lived in people’s heads | Stages with written exit criteria | Two sellers disagree about where a deal belongs |
| Strategic accounts distorted daily numbers | A second pipeline for international expansion | Two genuinely different motions share one board |
| Facts held in email threads | Short list of fields: category, regulatory status, territory, distributor tier | The business already asks the question out loud |
| Tight deadline | Scoped around the sales process, integrations left for later | A date is fixed and scope has to give |
When this approach does not fit
A design-from-scratch engagement is the wrong tool when the process is already written down and followed. A team in that position needs a tune-up, not a new build, and a rebuild versus repair check is the cheaper first step. It is also the wrong tool when the first problem is demand. A pipeline organizes the deals you have. It does not create them.
Who did the work
PipeDriven is powered by Sales Surge, and the work described here was done by the Sales Surge team. Sales Surge is a Pipedrive Platinum Partner, in the Top 8 worldwide since July 2026, and has delivered more than 150 CRM implementations. The firm was founded in 2023 and is based in the Netherlands, and Medres is one of its American clients. The design work would have looked the same in Chicago or in Rotterdam: find out how the company really sells, write it down in stages that can be checked, and give management numbers that mean something. What was specific to Medres was the domain.
What changes for a US rollout is the surrounding stack, covered in Pipedrive implementation in the USA. If your sales process lives in people’s heads rather than in a system, the readiness assessment is the place to start, and a call is the next step after it.
Last reviewed: October 2026
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