If you already use Google or Gmail for your business, you know that you can use Google Contacts as a simple CRM. Here in my example, I've got a number of special labels including New Leads, Qualifying, and WON.
Special Labels
However, there are some limitations here. For example, if I want to change Blair to a qualifying lead, I could take his name and just drag it into Qualifying, but it actually just adds that label. It will never remove the New Leads label. I've got to come over here and manually remove that as well. You will also see, if I go over to the Qualifying area and click on Blair, I'm pretty limited with the history and the amount of information that is available to me.
Why Sync
That's why I recommend syncing your Google Contacts account with a true CRM system such as Pipedrive. So let me walk you through how you can sync your contacts from within Google Contacts, so that they will show up and appear here within Pipedrive.
How to Sync
Inside your Pipedrive account, we want to come up to the top, right-hand corner, select your profile picture, and then select Personal Preferences. And on the left hand side, we want to come down to about the fourth option called Contact sync.
Now it's true, you can sync your contacts with other platforms, including outlook.com or Microsoft Office 365, but in our example, we are going to sync it with Google.
To get started, we can select this Add New Account button, and all we need to do is enter in the email address of the account we would like to connect. I'm going to select Continue here, and next, we will be presented with the standard Google sign-in screen.
I'm going to choose the correct account here. I'm going to give it the permissions that it is requiring. I'm going to select Allow, and then we are brought back to our Pipedrive account.
Sync Settings
Now, before it can start syncing with your account, we want to take a look at two particular settings. The first one is which group of contacts would we like to sync with Pipedrive. By default, all contacts will be selected, but perhaps you don't want to sync all of your contacts.
n my case, I only want to sync those that are new leads. So I'm going to come over here, select this dropdown menu, and we will see all of the labels within our Google Contacts account. I'm going to select New Leads in my example, and then next, we have a choice in terms of the sync direction.
We can choose a one-way sync, where Pipedrive will only receive new contacts that are added within Google Contacts, or we can choose a two-way sync, meaning that contacts that we create within our Pipedrive account will also be synced with that account.
In our example here, I'm going to select One-way, but you can choose which one is best for your case. At the bottom, I'm going to select Start syncing. It will give me a brief warning that Google does have a limit of 25,000 maximum contacts.
If you are anywhere near this number, please let me know in the comments, but for most users, this is a pretty healthy maximum. I'm going to select Enable contact sync, and immediately, Pipedrive will start to sync those contacts between your Google account and here within Pipedrive.
Now, depending on how many contacts you are syncing, this could take up to a minute, but in our example, it is pretty small. Here it's telling me that the last sync was a few seconds ago, four total contacts are in sync, three were added today, and one was updated today.
And if I ever need to come back here and change my settings, for example, if I want to change to a two-way sync or to add other labels, I can do so here, or I can choose to stop the sync as well.
New Contact
Now, when we come to our contact section here within Pipedrive, we have a few extra contacts that are being brought in here from Google Contacts. Let's go ahead and create a brand new contact just to see how quickly this sync is working. So I'm just going to call this one New Contact just so we can find it over in Pipedrive. And let's make sure we have that New Lead label, because remember, that's the only label that's going to bring that contact over.
Save
I'm going to go up here and select Save, and of course, it may take a few seconds, but if I go ahead and even just refresh this page here, now you can see that that new contact that was created in Google Contacts is listed here. And once it's in Pipedrive, I can add detailed notes. I can add activity and track that activity. I can even go ahead and email and manage all of my email conversations right here from within Pipedrive. So I have so many more options available to me, so I can win this deal and keep generating more business.
Conclusion
Now, if you're not already a Pipedrive user and using these powerful Google integrations, I’ve got good news for you. You can get started for free, and Simpletivity viewers get an additional 20% off of their first year. To learn more and get started, click the link in the description down below.
Thank you so much for watching today's video, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
