Most small Pipedrive accounts I look at have the same leak. A new deal lands, nobody owns it for a few hours, and when someone does pick it up there is no next activity on it. Pipedrive then shows it as a deal with nothing scheduled, and it quietly goes cold. By the end of this guide every new deal will get an owner the moment it is created, a first call due the same day, and a follow-up activity if nothing happens in two days.
What you need
- Pipedrive Growth or higher for Automations. Pipedrive’s help center says the Automations feature “is only available on Growth and higher plans.” Lite does not have it.
- Premium or higher for Automatic assignment (the built-in round-robin tool). The help article says Professional and higher. Pipedrive renamed its plans in 2025, and its own mapping puts Professional and Power into Premium. If you are on Growth, you can still assign owners with an automation. You just won’t get the team round-robin.
- Teams feature if you want round-robin across a group. Pipedrive says team assignment needs Teams, which sits on the same higher tier.
- Admin rights. Automatic assignment needs the “deals app admin” permission.
- Cost. Pipedrive charges per seat, and the price depends on plan and billing period. Check the current pricing page before you upgrade a whole team just for this. One option is to put only the people who build automations on the higher plan, if your contract allows mixed seats.
Step by step
1. Decide the routing rule on paper first
Write one sentence per rule before you touch the settings. For example:
- Deals with Source = “Website form” go to Sam and Priya in rotation.
- Deals with Source = “Referral” go to the owner of the linked organization.
- Everything else goes to the sales manager.
If you can’t write it as a sentence, the automation will be wrong too. Make sure the field you route on (a Source field, a label, or a pipeline) is actually filled in when the deal is created. If your web form doesn’t set it, fix the form first.
2. Set up Automatic assignment (Premium and up)
Go to Settings and open Automatic assignment. Create a rule for Deal added (there is also Lead added if you work out of the Leads inbox).
- Add a condition such as Source is “Website form”. Pipedrive needs at least one condition on every rule.
- Choose the assignee type. Team uses round-robin across the team’s members. Organization owner and Person owner hand the deal to whoever already owns that company or contact, which is the right call for existing customers.
- Make your last rule a catch-all that assigns a single User, so nothing ends up with no owner.
Pipedrive allows up to 50 rules per entity type and keeps assignment history for seven days. Check that history in the first week.
3. On Growth: assign the owner with an automation instead
Go to the account menu, then Tools and apps > Automations, and click + Automation.
- Trigger: Deal created.
- Condition: Source is “Website form”.
- Action: Update deal, and set the owner to the rep who covers that source.
That is a fixed assignment, not a rotation. If two reps share inbound, you can split by a field you already have, such as region or company size. Use if/else conditions for this. Growth allows 3 if/else steps per automation and Premium allows 10.
4. Create the first activity automatically
In the same automation, or in a second one triggered on Deal created, add a Create activity action:
- Type: Call
- Subject: “First call: {deal title}”
- Due: today
- Assigned to: deal owner
Pipedrive’s docs note that if you don’t set a date on a create-activity action, it defaults to the same day. That is fine for a first call. Set it explicitly anyway so the next person who edits the automation can see what it does.
If you also want a written touch, add a second activity of type Email, due tomorrow, with a subject like “Send recap and two time slots.”
5. Add a follow-up if nothing happens
A deal that gets a call activity but no conversation is still a leak. Build one more automation:
- Trigger: Activity updated, with the condition that the activity type is Call and it is marked done.
- Add a wait/delay of 2 days.
- Use a “wait for condition” step, or a check, that the deal is still in the first stage.
- Action: Create activity, type Call, subject “Second attempt: {deal title}”, due that day, assigned to the deal owner.
A schedule I’ve seen work for small teams is: first call on day 0, email on day 1, second call on day 2, final email on day 5. If the deal hasn’t moved by day 10, a person decides whether to mark it lost. The day numbers matter less than the rule that every open deal always has a next activity.
6. Optional: enroll inbound deals in a Sequence
If you have Sequences, there is a template under Tools and apps > Automations > Template > Deal called “Add deals to sequences.” It enrolls new deals in a pipeline into an email sequence. The sequence needs at least one step before the automation will link to it. Use this for the email touches and keep calls as activities, so reps can still see the calls in their activity list.
7. Test with fake deals
Create three test deals, one per routing rule, with your own email on the contact. Check four things:
- Who owns each one?
- Did the first activity appear with the right due date?
- After you mark the call done, does the day-2 activity show up two days later?
- Did any automation fire twice?
Delete the test deals when you’re done.
Common mistakes
- Routing on a field that’s empty at creation. If the web form doesn’t fill Source, every deal falls through to the catch-all, and it looks like the automation is broken.
- Two automations both creating the first activity. Templates plus a custom automation can double up. Keep one automation per job and give it a plain name, such as “Inbound: assign + first call.”
- Forgetting who can trigger it. Pipedrive lets you limit which users’ actions trigger an automation. If a rep’s imports shouldn’t create call tasks, set that.
- Hitting the open-deal limit. Pipedrive notes that automations that create deals fail at that step if you are at your plan’s open deal limit.
- No owner fallback. Always end with a rule that assigns a named person.
When it’s worth getting help
If you have one inbound source and two reps, you can build this in an afternoon with the steps above. It gets fiddly when leads come from several forms, an ads platform and a booking tool, and each one fills fields differently. Most of the work then is cleaning up what arrives before Pipedrive sees it. If that’s where you are, my B2B CRM page covers how I approach it. The cost calculator gives a rough idea of what slow follow-up costs you, so you can decide if it’s worth paying someone.