Who a Pipedrive setup is for
You have a small sales team, between two and five people, and a process you could draw on one page. Today it lives in a spreadsheet, an inbox or a free tier of another tool, and you want it in Pipedrive working by the time the next quarter starts. You do not have a CRM administrator and you do not want to become one.
That describes a lot of founder-led teams, small agencies, new sales departments and companies that grew past a shared spreadsheet. The setup is deliberately small: one pipeline, a short list of fields, and only the automations that are safe in the first month.
Who it is not for
If you have more than about five users, two distinct sales motions, years of data in another CRM or an integration with an accounting system, you are describing a different project. Read about implementation services. If you have an account already and it is not working, a Pipedrive audit comes first, because building a new setup on top of a bad one produces two bad setups.
What we build, phase by phase
A setup is five pieces of work in a fixed order. The order matters more than the tooling: every field, automation and report hangs off the pipeline, so the pipeline comes first.
Phase 1. One working session on how you sell
We spend a working session with you and whoever closes deals, and we write down where deals come from, what has to be true before one moves forward and why they die. Skipping this and opening the tool first is how teams end up with a pipeline that matches nobody. You receive a one-page process description in your own words.
Phase 2. The pipeline and the field list
You receive one pipeline, five to seven stages named after what the buyer has done, and an exit criterion per stage that a new hire can check without asking. The field list is built backwards from the reports: a field that appears in no report does not get built. Details on how we think about both are in the pipeline design guide and the custom fields guide.
Phase 3. Email, calendar and the safe automations
We connect mail and calendar sync, set required fields only where they block a decision, and add the automations that are safe in week one: a follow-up activity when a deal enters a stage, a reminder when a deal sits idle, and defaults when a deal is created. Anything that emails a customer waits for a month. You receive each automation described in one sentence, with what it does and who owns it. The reasoning is in the automations guide and in email sync.
Phase 4. The first dashboard
You receive a dashboard that answers the three questions you will ask on Monday: what is in the pipeline, what has stalled, and what closed. It is built from the fields in phase 2, which is why those fields were chosen with it in mind. Anything more elaborate, such as weighted forecasting by segment, is a separate piece of work. See dashboards and reporting for how that grows.
Phase 5. Training and handover
One session for the people who will use it, on your own account, and one short session for whoever will own it. You receive the documentation of every automation, a one-page guide to the daily path, and a first-week check after go-live, so the small questions get answered while the team is still deciding whether to bother.
The two to three weeks at a glance
The calendar is short because the scope is small, and it stretches only when decisions do. This is how the weeks usually fall, and where a delay on your side shows up first.
| Week | What happens | Where it slips |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The working session, then the pipeline and field list for your review | Nobody has decided what a qualified deal means |
| 2 | Configuration, sync, automations and the first dashboard | Access to the mailbox or the calendar arrives late |
| 3 | Training, handover and the first-week check once the team is live | The team is not in the room for the session |
A decisive team lands at the short end of the range. A team that needs to argue about stage names spends the extra week arguing, and no amount of configuration shortens that.
What we need from your team
| From | What |
|---|---|
| The person who decides | An answer on what a qualified deal means, and about two hours a week while the work runs |
| Everyone who sells | A short interview each in phase 1, and an honest account of the process |
| Whoever has the data | A tidy sheet of contacts and open deals, with duplicates removed and one row per person |
| Whoever will own it | Present in phases 3 to 5, so the handover is a continuation and not a lesson |
What a setup costs
A setup sits in the first of the four bands we publish: team of 2 to 5, no migration, one pipeline. That band is $3,300 to $5,500 as a one-off, over 2 to 3 weeks. We write the scope down and agree the price before the work starts, and the price moves only if the scope moves.
| If your situation changes | It moves into | One-off cost |
|---|---|---|
| Team of 2 to 5, no migration, one pipeline | This service | $3,300 to $5,500 |
| Team of 5 to 20, migration from a sheet or a light CRM | An implementation | $6,600 to $13,200 |
| Team of 20 to 80, migration from HubSpot or Salesforce | An implementation with a larger migration | $13,200 to $27,500 |
Licenses are separate and go to Pipedrive per user, per month. A consultant's hour in the market costs $100 to $165, which is useful as a sanity check on the scope: the band above is the cost of the thinking and the build together, not the cost of the clicks. The cost page shows what sits inside each band, and a small team that is not sure which row applies can use the cost calculator.
What we leave out on purpose
A small setup is quick because it is small. These are the things we leave out, and each is a decision, not an oversight.
- Customer-facing email automation. It waits a month, until the team has worked in the account and the stages have settled.
- Fields for later. A field that no report needs is a field reps will skip. You can add one in a minute when a report appears that needs it.
- Integrations with other systems. Each is its own small software project and is quoted separately if you need it.
- A second pipeline. Most teams need one. A genuinely different motion, such as renewals, is added when it exists.
What clients say
PipeDriven is powered by Sales Surge. Sales-Surge B.V. is a Pipedrive Platinum Partner with more than 150 CRM implementations, and its Marketplace listing shows 5.0 from 11 reviews. Two of those reviews describe a Pipedrive built around a team's own process, from the information the team supplied.
The Sales Surge Team setup our Pipedrive. They promptly took all the information we gave them and did an exellent job in setting up our sales team in Pipedrive.
They structured our pipelines, configured our workflows, and implemented the right tooling stack around Pipedrive to give our SDRs and Account Managers a clear, repeatable system for finding leads and closing deals.
You can read the others on the reviews page, with dates and a link to the listing they come from.
When a setup service is the wrong choice
- You can do it yourself. A clean process and an afternoon are enough for some founders. The test in DIY versus hiring a partner gives you an honest score, and if you land low we would rather you built it and booked a review afterwards.
- You do not have a process yet. If you are still working out how you sell, configuration will freeze guesses. Start with starting without a CRM.
- You are moving data from another CRM. That is a migration with its own checks, and it does not fit a setup scope. The spreadsheet migration guide shows what counts as small enough.
- You want it live this week. A responsible setup needs one working session and a review loop. If a deadline is firm, tell us on the first call, and we will say what can be done and what cannot.
The pitfalls are collected in twelve common implementation mistakes, and the page on setting up without the blank page describes how we start with a default account that has no opinion about your business.
Next step
Send us how you sell today, in whatever form it exists, and how many people will use Pipedrive. On the call we confirm the band, name what is in the scope and what is not, and give you the date the first working session could happen.
Last reviewed: October 2026. Amounts are in US dollars and rounded.