Create a customer

Winning a deal is just the beginning of your business relationship with a company! Pipeline helps you stay on top of managing the post-sales relationship through its Customer Management feature set (available only on Develop and Grow plans). Converting a company to a customer opens up additional functionality to help you manage key contacts, communicate the health of your business relationship, and keep track of important future dates and milestones. These upgraded features are beyond what is possible with a company record.

Pipeline will automatically prompt you to convert a company to a customer after you’ve won your first deal with that record. If there are companies that need to be converted at different points, or retroactively, you can manually convert the company records to customers individually or in bulk. If the customer is being entered into Pipeline, you can quickly create them on the fly, similar to the way you add a new company record.

Converting a Company to a Customer

You can quickly convert any existing company record to a customer from the company profile page of a record by following these steps:

Go to the company profile page of the record you want to convert.
On the upper right side of the screen, select the “Actions” button.
From the Actions dropdown, select “Convert to Customer”.
Pipeline will process your request and refresh the page -- your company record has now been converted to a customer.

Converting multiple companies to customers

If you already have companies that you are doing regular business with and consider them to be customers, you can save time and convert them all at once from the Company list view. To convert multiple companies to customers, follow the steps below:

In the main navigation bar, select the Companies tab.
Using the checkbox to the left of each record, select each record row that you would like to convert to a customer.
You’ll notice that as soon as you select the first record, a new “Convert to customer” bulk action button will appear at the top of the list view table.
Once you’ve selected all of the records you would like to bulk convert, select the “Convert to customer” button.
A modal window will appear confirming how many records will be converted. Note that if you inadvertently select any records that are already customers, they will be ignored while all other records will be converted.
Select “convert” to begin the process. When complete, a notification will appear in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.

Pro tip: You can quickly filter to show companies that you have previously won deals with by bringing in the “Has Deals” column and filtering to show companies where the value is “Yes”. As a more nuanced variation of this, if you are on our Grow plan, you can use the “Won Deals” column to convert companies that you have achieved a certain volume of business with.

Pro tip: Just like you can convert multiple companies to customers at one time, you can set the health status of multiple customers in bulk. Select the records you’d like to set a health status for and then under the More bulk action dropdown, choose “Update customer health status”. You’ll be presented with a modal to select the status and add any additional comments that will be individually applied to the selected records.

Adding a new customer to your account

Rather than entering a new company and then converting it to a customer manually once it has been saved, you can do this all in one step from the add new record “+” menu. Follow these steps:

From anywhere in the app, select the “+” icon in the top navigation.
Select “Company” from the dropdown.
In the modal window that opens, select the Customer button. This specifies that this new record should automatically be added as a customer.
Complete all other fields as needed and select “Save”.
The new customer record will be added and a notification confirming the addition will appear in the bottom left-hand corner.

Reverting a customer back to a company

If you ever need to revert a customer back to a company record, this process is nearly identical to the initial conversion. You can revert a customer from both the customer profile page and from the companies list view.

From the customer profile page:

Go to the customer profile page of the record you want to revert.
Select the Actions button.
From the Actions dropdown, select “Revert Customer”.
Pipeline will process your request and refresh the page -- your company record has now been reverted to a company. Note that all customer milestones, key contacts, and current health status details will not be saved.

From the companies list view:

In the main navigation bar, select the Companies tab.
Using the checkbox to the left of each record, select each record row that you would like to revert to a company.
Once you’ve selected all of the records you would like to bulk convert, select the “More” bulk action menu and select “Revert Customer”.
A modal window will appear confirming how many records will be reverted and detailing what information will be deleted.
Select “Revert” to begin the process. When complete, a notification will appear in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.

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