Hey Pipedrive enthusiasts!

Ever wondered how to keep your sales team focused without everyone seeing everything? Let's dive into visibility groups – one of Pipedrive's most powerful features for managing data access.

What are visibility groups, anyway?

By creating visibility groups you’ll decide what different users can see in Pipedrive. For example you can separate regional sales teams by assigning them to different visibility groups so that everybody stays focused on their territory.

Or, if you work with external agents, you can put them into a visibility sub-group. This way, the external users will only access specific data whereas your in-house teams will be able to see everything.

In short, visibility groups can help you protect sensitive information and manage multiple departments within the same Pipedrive instance.

Setting up your first visibility group

Before you head to the settings of your Pipedrive CRM to set up visibility groups, here's a pro tip: map out your organisation's structure on paper first.

Trust me, it'll save you headaches later!

This will help you visualise how different teams at your organisation work: do they work side by side on certain processes? Is there a hierarchy? Is there an approval layer? Etc.

Smart setups we've seen

The Regional Setup has become increasingly popular. By creating groups based on geography, you will ensure that only reps covering the same territories can access the same records in your CRM system.

In this example we have 4 visibility groups structured as follows:

• EMEA:

  • Germany

  • Others

• North America

More specifically, you can tweak the additional visibility settings so that:

• The users in the EMEA visibility group (presumably your sales managers) have visibility on the records owned by their peers and the user belonging to any of the subgroups.

• The users in the Germany visibility group can only see records owned by users in the same group. They can’t therefore see records owned by the users in the Others visibility group. The users belonging to the Others group will have the same set of rules apply to them.

• The users in the North America visibility group won’t have access to anything owned by the users in the EMEA visibility group and its sub-groups. They will only see records owned by users in their visibility group.

This approach creates clean, focused pipelines and better data relevance for reporting.

The only downside? Deal transfers between regions might need extra attention, and you'll need to watch out for accidental information silos.

Another idea for your visibility groups is the Need-to-Know structure which bases access on seniority and role. While this provides excellent security and clarity, it requires more maintenance and might occasionally slow down cross-team collaboration.

More than just groups

A very handy feature within the visibility groups settings is the possibility to customise the visibility of each CRM object (e.g. deals, organisations, contacts, etc.) within each group.

For instance, you may want to adopt a stricter approach for deals while making organisations and contacts more visible across groups.

This would keep your teams focused while making contextual datapoints available to your entire organisation.

Avoiding common pitfalls

Experience has taught us that less is more with visibility groups. Creating too many groups too quickly is likely to become a nightmare.

Always ensure your admin access is properly set up, and plan ahead for employee turnover – you don't want to scramble to reassign visibility rights when someone leaves.

Got a cool visibility group setup? Reply to this email – We’d love to feature your strategy in one of our next issues!

Remember: The best visibility setup is one that balances security with usability. Keep it simple, keep it logical.

Happy Pipedriving! 🚀