Products and pricing: a setup that scales

Why this matters

Without products, Pipedrive knows you won €38,000 last month. With products, it knows the €38,000 was two implementation projects, three training days and one support contract. Only the second version answers real questions. Which offering grows, which one gets discounted to death, and what should we hire for next quarter.

Products also change quoting. Once deals carry line items, a Smart Docs quote can pull the items straight into a table instead of a rep retyping prices into a document. Every retyped price is a chance for the quote and the CRM to disagree, and they take that chance often.

The honest counterpoint: if every deal is bespoke, a catalogue of one product called Custom project at price zero helps nobody. Then a plain deal value plus a custom field for the work type is the better setup. The catalogue must describe things you sell repeatedly, or it is theatre.

The design decisions that matter

Decision one: granularity. One product per sellable unit, not per variant of phrasing. Implementation project, Training day, Support retainer. Not fifteen products for fifteen past project names. If two lines would always appear together, they are one product. Pipedrive also supports product variations for size or tier differences under one product.

Decision two: where the price lives. Set the list price on the product, per currency where you sell in several. Reps adjust quantity and apply a discount per line item on the deal. The list price stays the anchor, and the discount becomes measurable.

Decision three: one-time versus recurring. Line items carry a billing frequency, so keep one-time fees and recurring fees as separate products. Mixing setup fee and subscription into one product price is the fastest way to make both numbers wrong.

Decision four: ownership. The catalogue gets one owner with edit rights. Everyone else attaches products but does not create them. This is a permissions decision, and it is the one that keeps the catalogue clean after month three.

A worked example

A digital agency selling projects and retainers. The catalogue has six products, and the whole revenue model fits in one table.

A typical deal carries Website project at quantity one with a 10 percent discount, plus Hosting and care at twelve months. The deal value sums itself. In Insights, a won deals report grouped by product shows exactly where the year came from, and a report on discount percentage shows who gives margin away.

Common mistakes

Catalogue sprawl is first. Reps get creation rights, each creates products named after the client or the month, and after a year there are 240 products of which 200 were used once. Revenue by product becomes unreadable. Lock creation down on day one.

Second, free-typed line items. Pipedrive allows one-off items on a deal, and they have their place for the genuine exception. When a quarter of your line items are one-offs, your catalogue is missing real products, and the mix report undercounts everything.

Third, ignoring currencies. A UK deal priced from the euro list at a hand-calculated rate drifts from reality with every invoice. Set the pound price on the product once, and let deal currency select it.

Maintenance

Quarterly, the catalogue owner reviews three lists. Products with no attached deals in six months get deactivated, not deleted, so history keeps its links. Duplicate candidates with near-identical names get merged into one, and the pricing page gets checked against the current rate card. The whole review takes an hour.

Watch the discount report monthly. Average discount creeping up is the earliest signal of pricing pressure you will get, well before it reaches the revenue dashboards. That signal is the reason this whole setup exists.

Questions