For our business we work with a lot of deals, often multiple ones per person. However in automations and search it is quite hard to select a contact with a particular deal. For instance when you select a deal in a specific pipeline (and stage) it selects all the won/lost/open deals and there is no way to just select the open ones or the closed ones. There is a function of course to look for the number of open/closed/won deals but not in relation to a specific pipeline. For our business this is quite frustrating sometimes. Often there are ways around it, but it just takes a lot more time.
So I was wondering if a more complete deal selection feature is in the works (both in search and automations). If you want I could also give more specific suggestions of how to improve it. But basically the idea is that it becomes possible that you can combine the parameters to search for a person with a specific deal (preferably with an option to select a deal based on its age as well).
Thanks for the feedback and suggestions. I want to be sure that I’m understanding what functionality you’re looking for and the best way might be to compare what you’re looking for to what we currently have.
When you say…
How is that different than this filter that shows open/won/lost per pipeline? I think maybe I’m not sure what you mean by “selects.”
Do the Advanced filtering options help with this at all?
It seems like you could search by deal age here and then use the keyword search to look for a specific name.
If I’m misunderstanding what you’re looking for, please let me know. Ultimately I’d like to get this feedback to our product team because we definitely want to be offering the robust and precise deal search functionality our customers are looking for.
Thanks again for taking the time. Candid feedback like this is very important to us and really does make a difference on the product.
Thank you for your response. When I read back my initial post it sounded a little bit like I might not be very happy with ActiveCampaign but just to let you know that is not the case. I often really enjoy the features and the fact that the CRM is combined with the email marketing. However, with a few modifications to deal search/selection (not sure what to call it) it would truly help us a lot.
My suggestions are mostly focused on automations and the search feature when you want to send a campaign to a particular group of contacts (for instance those who have an open deal in a particular stage with a particular age). It is true that some of these things are possible in the Deal section (for instance deal age and won/lost/open), but it is in the automations and campaign section I would like to use it the most.
For instance yesterday we needed to send a one-time email to all open deals in a particular stage with a particular deal age. This is quite a hassle to do it right in the current situation and involves quite some manual work (unless I missed something).
So basically what I would like to see is an option to select contacts with deals based on multiple criteria for that specific deal. So you can “select” people in automations or campaigns with an open deal that is this old, in this stage and possibly with this particular name. I hope this is clear and I think it could fundamentally improve both the email marketing and CRM a lot.
Best regards and thanks for your work to make ActiveCampaign one of the best solutions out there.
I see. Thanks for clarifying. So what you’re interested in is being able to segment contacts on the basis of deal criteria we don’t currently have options for.
I would do this by creating a campaign and then creating a segment on the second step (where you select the list). That will open the segment builder and allow you to combine conditions to get the exact group of contacts you’re looking for.
It looks like the missing condition here is “deal age.” As a workaround, you could create a custom contact field for deal age or deal creation date and then create an automation that updates that date field with the current date and time when the deal is added to the pipeline. Then you could use the segment builder to target contacts with deals that were created in a certain range.
But, yes, ideally there would be a built-in condition option for that.
Searching by particular name would require you to have names in the deal title. Then you could use the “has deal with title” segment option.
This part shouldn’t be a problem. The segment builder allows you to combine conditions with AND and OR criteria and create condition groups to create complex logic. I’d be surprised if it can’t handle what you want it to do. The problem here seems to be the options it presents but I think the custom field solution for the dates should solve this for you going forward.
Hi Brian, Yes I follow you and that is also what I thought initially. But deals are different from any other contact fields/tags/etc and most of what you said doesn’t work once you have multiple deals per person in my experience.
As far as I understand the reason is this: the logic of and/or works on the contact level and not on the deal level. For instance you can’t say I want those people who have a deal that is open and in this stage. All you can say is I want those people who have any deal that is open and any deal in this stage.
So let’s say a person has a deal called phone (won) and a deal called computer (lost), if I were to search for a person with deal name phone and deal status lost this person would be selected. There are ways around it sometimes but not when you have a big database with all possible combinations.
I think this only becomes clear for people once you have a lot of deals and errors begin to appear. So now we are very careful with this feature. I was surprised the system didn’t have a function for this.
This is correct and you’re right that’s a limitation of the solution I proposed. Would it be possible to consolidate multiple deals into a single deal? I’m not sure whether the pros outweigh the cons here, but if your ability to search for deals is most important, it might be worth considering.
Eventually you’ll be able to add fields to deals and that will make this much easier but I do not know when that will be.
It is not possible for us to consolidate deals into a single deal because there are too many possible combinations (we have about 30 different deal types each season). I think with a few small changes and the added ability to search for people with deals based on multiple criteria is very important, even though you might not get many requests for it from other people.
Every few days we are confronted with this limitation of the system and it would be our number 1 desired improvement.
