# Free-trial signups in Pipedrive: who gets a call, and when

https://salesbond.app/blog/free-trial-signups-pipedrive/
Published: 2026-10-05 · Updated: 2026-10-26

Call the trials that fit your customer profile and show some use of the product, not everyone who typed an email into the signup form. Put each signup in Pipedrive as a lead with the source “Trial”, add the two or three usage facts you can actually get out of your own product, and let one written rule decide who gets a call partway through the trial. Everyone else gets email. Below is how to set that up so it holds with a sales team of three to five people.

## Ten signups, and you can’t call them all

Say ten people signed up for the trial last week. Two left a company email and a real name. Three used Gmail. One signed up twice. Nobody on the sales side knows which of them opened the product after the welcome email, because that information lives in the product database, or in the billing tool, or in a dashboard the founder looks at on Fridays.

A small team usually falls into one of two habits. Either the rep calls all ten, which takes a day, annoys the people who wanted to look around alone and reaches the voicemail of the ones who were serious. Or nobody calls anyone, and the trials that would have converted after a twenty-minute conversation quietly expire.

Neither is a rule. Both are what happens when there isn’t one. The rule below decides [where the trial ends and the deal begins](https://salesbond.app/blog/saas-sales/).

## What you actually know about a signup

The PLG blogs assume an analytics stack and a growth team behind it. Most teams of five have neither, so start with the honest list of what you can know about every signup:

- what the form gave you: name, email, company if you asked, the date;
- whether the person logged in at all after signing up;
- whether they created the first real thing in your product (a project, a pipeline, an invoice, whatever your “first entity” is);
- whether they invited a colleague.

That is three usage facts on top of the form. In many products they come out of a single query or an admin-panel export. If your product can’t tell you even the login, fix that first, before you touch Pipedrive. Guessing engagement from the email domain is not a usage signal, its a hunch.

There is a name for what you are building here. A product-qualified lead (PQL) is a trial user who qualifies through what they did in the product, not through the act of signing up. The fields below are a small team’s version of that, with no scoring model attached. What you don’t have, don’t invent: nobody needs a “lead score” column that no one can explain at the Monday meeting.

## A signup is a lead, not a deal

We put every trial signup in the Leads Inbox, not the pipeline. The inbox exists for opportunities that aren’t ready to move through a pipeline yet, with a conversion to a deal when they are ( [Pipedrive: Leads Inbox](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/leads-inbox)). A pipeline with forty “Trial” deals at zero value and no next step tells the manager nothing, and the win-rate report stops meaning anything within a month. Physical samples are different, since they cost real money before anyone commits, so we give [product sample requests](https://salesbond.app/blog/product-sample-requests-pipedrive/) a deal stage with an exit rule. The longer argument is in [leads vs deals in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-leads-vs-deals/).

Two things to settle on the day you set this up.

**Source.** Pipedrive’s Source channel is a dropdown, and only an admin decides what’s on it, in Company Settings > Data fields. Any user can then pick a value on a record, one at a time or in bulk from the list view ( [Pipedrive: lead source for leads and deals](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/lead-source-deals)). So the first step is an admin adding “Trial” to that list. Don’t lean on Source origin instead: Pipedrive fills that one itself, and for anything that came in through an import it simply says Import, so a filter on it can’t tell your trials from last year’s spreadsheet.

If you followed our [web-forms setup](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-lead-source-web-forms/), you already have a short channel list of six values and a note that a seventh gets added only on purpose. Trial is that seventh value. It is not Inbound website: trial signups don’t arrive through your Pipedrive web forms but from your product, through the import, and a trial user has already been inside the product and gets a different call rule. Keep the two apart, and the lead conversion report will show trials as their own column instead of hiding them in website traffic.

**When it becomes a deal.** Use the same line as for any other lead: confirmed interest (a reply, or a meeting held or booked), a known pipeline, and a dated next activity, all three at once ( [the three-line rule](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-leads-vs-deals/)). For trials the trap is converting on the call attempt. That fills the pipeline with people who never picked up. Wait for the conversation, and the pipeline stays a list of real decisions, which is the only thing a small team can forecast from.

## Four fields, and where the values come from

Pipedrive offers 16 custom field types, and you need three of them: Date, Single option and Numerical ( [Pipedrive: types of custom fields](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/what-types-of-custom-fields-are-there)). Create them in Data fields as lead/deal fields, so they show on the lead.

| Field | Type | Values | Why this and nothing more |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Trial start | Date | signup date | the only date you know for certain |
| Trial end | Date | start plus your trial length | lets you filter “ends this week” without arithmetic |
| Usage | Single option | none / light / active | three options a rep can set without a meeting about what “light” means |
| Invited teammates | Numerical | 0, 1, 2… | usually the first sign that more than one person is in the decision |

Define “light” and “active” in one sentence each and keep the definition next to the field. Ours, for a product where the first entity is a project: none means never logged in after signup; light means logged in, no project; active means created a project. Yours will differ. What matters is that two reps looking at the same person pick the same option.

Now the part nobody writes about: filling them.

A small team does not need an integration on day one. Once a week (every morning, if your trials are short), export the signups and the three usage facts from your product or billing tool into a spreadsheet and import it into the Leads Inbox. Pipedrive imports XLS, XLSX and CSV files and can add or update records; custom fields have to exist before the import ( [importing data with spreadsheets](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/importing-data-into-pipedrive-with-spreadsheets)). On the lead import you can map columns to any lead/deal custom field, every row needs a Lead title plus a person or organization name, and updating leads you already have goes through the Pipedrive system ID column ( [Pipedrive: how can I import leads](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/how-can-i-import-leads)). So the sheet needs that ID next to every signup that’s already in Pipedrive, or next week’s Usage values arrive as duplicates.

Source channel is not one of the fields the lead import lists. After each import filter the inbox for Trial start filled and Source channel empty, select the rows and set Source channel to Trial in bulk. It takes a minute, and it’s the same bulk edit the web-forms article uses for blank sources.

Is a weekly spreadsheet elegant? No. It is fifteen minutes or so, it is under your control, and it means the Usage field is right on the day you decide who to call. Automate it once the manual version has run for a month and you know which columns actually get looked at.

## Who gets a call: fit, usage, then the trial day

![Two-by-two grid: fits ICP vs usage, deciding call this week, one call before trial end, or email only](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/free-trial-signups-pipedrive-2.png)

One rule, written down, applied by a filter rather than by feel. Ours has three parts, in this order.

Fit comes first. If the company is not the kind that pays you, usage is irrelevant: an active trial from a one-person shop you can’t serve is still not a call. Use the customer profile you’ve already drawn from won deals (if you haven’t, [this is how we do it](https://salesbond.app/blog/ideal-customer-profile-won-deals/)) and check the signup data against it. Company size, industry or role is usually enough for a yes or no in B2B.

Usage second. Active, or any invited teammate, gets a call. Light gets one call, timed before the trial ends. None gets no call. We would rather miss a quiet buyer than train the team to phone people who never logged in; the quiet buyer still gets the the emails, and with the “none” group a call feels like a cold call because it is one.

The day comes last, and it’s yours to find. We won’t hand you a day number, because any number you read elsewhere comes from products and trial lengths that are not yours. Take your last six to twelve months of trials, look at the day on which the ones that bought first did something that looked like intent, and put the call a day or two before that. Short trials compress everything. A seven-day trial gives you one window, not a schedule. If they reply on the last day asking for more time, extend once and only on conditions: here is what to ask for [when a prospect asks to extend the trial](https://salesbond.app/blog/trial-extension-request-pipedrive/).

In Pipedrive the rule becomes a saved custom filter in the Leads Inbox, which you can add to your favorites (the Leads Inbox help page covers both): Source channel is Trial, Usage is active or Invited teammates is above zero, Trial end is within the next few days, owner is me. Save it, star it, and that is the trial call list. The filter answers who. How fast to react to a brand-new signup is a different question, and we answered it in [speed to lead in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/speed-to-lead-pipedrive/).

If you label leads, the label follows the same rule. We wouldn’t maintain a second hot/warm/cold logic for trials on top of [the one you already have](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-lead-labels-hot-warm-cold-rule/).

## Open with what they did, not with who you are

The call is short, and the first sentence is about them. “You set up a project on Tuesday and invited a colleague. What were you trying to get working?” beats every version of “I’m calling to see how your trial is going”. The second invites a status update. The first invites a story, and the story is where the buying reason lives.

This only works if the rep can see the usage facts on the lead before dialing, which is the practical reason the fields exist. A rep who has to open the admin panel in a second tab will stop doing it by Thursday.

Two more things we ask reps to do on these calls. Ask what they expected the product to do that it hasn’t done yet, and write the answer in a note on the lead. And if the answer is “nothing, I was just looking”, thank them and leave Usage as it was. That’s a data point, not a failure. If they agree to a demo and then don’t turn up, that is [its own problem](https://salesbond.app/blog/demo-no-shows-pipedrive/) with its own fix.

## The ones you don’t call

They are not dead leads. They’re just not worth a rep’s hour this week, and the way you treat them decides whether any of them come back.

The “none” and no-fit groups get the automated trial emails your product already sends. If it sends none, a short group email from the Leads Inbox is enough to start with, and it should be the same text for everyone so the numbers can be read later. When a trial expires without a conversation, archive the lead rather than deleting it: archiving keeps it in the account without cluttering the active inbox, which is exactly what Pipedrive’s help describes it for. On the ones that fit, put a revisit activity 30 days out. We’d rather catch a buyer after thier budget cycle than send them a fourth email.

## The one number to look at

Trial-to-deal conversion by Usage group, one week of signups at a time.

Count it in the spreadsheet you import from, not in Pipedrive. The sheet already holds the Usage value for every signup on the day you made the call list. Add one column, “became a deal”, and fill it in when the trial ends. Then count: how many “active” signups became deals, how many “light”, how many “none”. The first time, a pen and the sheet are enough.

If “none” converts as well as “active”, your definition of usage is wrong and the field should measure something else. If “active” converts and “light” doesn’t, you’ve just saved the team every light call. Either answer changes next week’s filter, and that’s the point of counting.

Once a trial is a deal, the question changes from “should we call” to “is this deal being worked”, and that is where we spend our own time. We build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses; we started with Pipedrive. Deal Health checks every deal in the connected CRM against the enabled rules, assigns a health score, shows the specific violations and explains what to do. The trial deals your reps create next month are a good place to see it: [Check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/).