# Pipedrive activity types: keep the list short so the report means something

https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-activity-types/
Published: 2026-10-04 · Updated: 2026-10-25

Keep your Pipedrive activity types to a short list of verbs a rep actually does: call, meeting, demo, follow-up email, task, maybe proposal. Push everything else, how it went and how urgent it is, into the Outcome and Priority fields and the note. Only global admins can add a type ( [Pipedrive: creating custom activity types](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/creating-custom-activity-types)), and the Activities performance report counts by type ( [Pipedrive: Insights activities performance report](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/insights-reports-activities-performance)), so every extra type splits your counts one more way. Five to seven types is enough for almost any small sales team we have seen. Fourteen is a list nobody can read a report from.

Priority needs its own agreement, and we keep [a rule for each priority level](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-activity-priority-labels/) so that the label tells a rep how urgent the step is.

## Why the activity type is the field every report starts from

An activity type in Pipedrive is an icon and a name that a rep picks every time they log an activity: Call, Meeting, Task and so on. It takes under a second, and it is usually the first choice they make.

Now open the Activities performance report in Insights. The first question a manager asks of it is “how many calls did we make”, and that is a question about type. So the type is the one field that touches both ends: the rep’s habit and the manager’s chart. The deal stage tells you where a deal is. The type tells you what the team did to move it. Calls per rep per week, meetings held before a proposal, every count of effort starts by filtering on it.

Which means the list of types is not an admin setting. It is the vocabulary your activity data is written in. Add a word nobody agrees on, and from that day two reps describe the same call differently. No report will put them back together.

## Where to add a type and who can

Adding a type is a global admin job. Regular users and managers can’t do it; the help is explicit about that ( [Pipedrive: creating custom activity types](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/creating-custom-activity-types)). If you have the rights, it takes four steps:

1. Go to Settings > Company settings > Activities.
2. Add a new activity type.
3. Pick an icon.
4. Give it a name and save. It appears in the picker for everyone.

We think the restriction is a feature. The list can be a decision made once, not something that grows by one every time a rep wants a special label for a special Tuesday. Treat a request for a new type the way you would treat a request for a new pipeline stage: ask what report it will change.

You rarely start from zero. Pipedrive ships with defaults that include call, meeting, task, deadline, email and lunch ( [Pipedrive: activities](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/activities)), and most teams can get to a good list by renaming three or four of them and ignoring the the ones nobody uses.

## Pipedrive activity types that work: five to seven verbs

The rule we use: a type is a verb. Not a stage, not a result. “Call” is a type. “Discovery call” is a stage pretending to be a type, and the deal already has a stage. “Call, no answer” is a result pretending to be a type; that is what the Outcome field is for.

![Activity types are actions: Call, Meeting, Demo, Follow-up email, Proposal, Task; stages, results and duplicates crossed out](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/pipedrive-activity-types-2.png)

Here is the list we would give a five-person team selling a product with a demo in the cycle:

- **Call**: any phone or video conversation that is not a scheduled meeting, including the ones that reach nobody. A missed inbound call goes in the same way, with someone named for the callback; see [how to handle a missed call in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/missed-call-follow-up-pipedrive/).
- **Meeting**: a scheduled conversation with the customer, on their calendar as well as yours.
- **Demo**: a product walkthrough. Worth separating from Meeting only if you look at demos on their own, for example for [no-shows](https://salesbond.app/blog/demo-no-shows-pipedrive/).
- **Follow-up email**: an email a rep writes by hand to move a deal, logged as an activity.
- **Proposal**: sending or presenting a quote, if your cycle has that step and you want to count it.
- **Task**: internal work on the deal with no customer contact.

Six. A team with no demo drops to five; a team that does on-site visits adds one.

If LinkedIn is a channel your team keeps losing track of, it is the one place where a custom type can earn its spot: [a LinkedIn activity with a one-line note](https://salesbond.app/blog/linkedin-outreach-log-pipedrive/) beats a deal with no record of the conversation.

How many is too many? You will feel it before you count it: a rep hesitates in the picker, or two types could both describe the same call. In practice that starts somewhere past seven. Before adding an eighth, ask what it will tell you that a filter on an existing type plus a field would not.

Notice what the list leaves out. No “Call 1” and “Call 2”: the sequence is visible in the deal’s history. No “Intro call” or “Proposal call”, because the stage says that. No “Check-in” next to “Follow up” next to “Follow-up call”. The next time a rep logs one they will pick whichever is nearest the top, and three types will share one activity’s worth of meaning.

There is one honest exception, and it is about email. If your team has “Automatically add emails sent from Pipedrive as activities” switched on, every sent email becomes a completed activity, and each user chooses which type it gets. Give those a type of their own, “Email (sent)” or similar, so they never land in the same bucket as the follow-up a rep wrote by hand. We explained the setup in our piece on [the activity Outcome field](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-activity-outcome-field/). That makes seven, and it is the only type on the list that describes a machine rather than a person.

Where does the information you removed go? Into the Outcome field, which since July 2026 can be made required per activity type, together with Priority and Note ( [Pipedrive product updates](https://www.pipedrive.com/en/product-updates)). The short version: the type answers “what did you do”, the outcome answers “how did it go”, and a type list that tries to answer both ends up answering neither.

## What the Activities performance report does with your types

The report counts activities by type, status and user, and it can place them in time by one of three dates: when the activity was created, when it was due, and when it was marked done ( [Pipedrive: Insights activities performance report](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/insights-reports-activities-performance)). A follow-up scheduled on Monday, due Thursday and completed Friday lands in three different weeks depending on which date you chose. That alone is the usual reason two people quote [different figures from the same Insights report](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-insights-different-numbers/).

Status is the limit that matters most for the type list. You can’t filter the report by status, but status is there in the visual builder and in the table. So “calls done versus calls planned” per rep is a chart you can build without inventing anything. Some teams still react to the missing filter by creating a “Call (done)” type. Don’t. Status already exists, and a type that copies it just splits your calls in two.

Email is the other limit. A message counts in this report only if it was added as an activity; mail that lives only in the thread does not appear. When the opposite happens and auto-logged emails swell the totals, the fix is the separate type above, and we went through reading the report type by type in [why the activity report looks inflated](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-email-activities-activity-report-inflated/).

Duration is measured too, and the help says it is always calculated in hours. A fifteen-minute call shows up as a fraction. Fine for a weekly total, awkward for a per-call average, and not a reason for a “Short call” type either.

What a clean list gives you here, with no other tooling, is a weekly view that reads at a glance: calls, meetings and demos per rep, by the week they were done. Add outcomes, and the same calls can later be grouped by weekday to find [the best day to call](https://salesbond.app/blog/best-days-to-call-pipedrive/). What it won’t tell you is whether any of those calls went anywhere. That is the job of the Outcome field and the deal’s next stage, and which of these numbers belongs on the wall is a [separate conversation about activity metrics](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-activity-metrics-small-team/).

## What the help does not say about renaming and deactivating a type

The Knowledge Base article on custom types covers creation and stops. As of October 2026 it does not describe renaming, deactivating or deleting a type, what happens to activities already logged with it, or whether there is a cap on how many types a company can have.

Two other sources fill part of the gap. A Guideflow walkthrough shows a toggle next to each type under Company settings > Activities; once a type is switched off, “it will no longer appear as an option when creating or editing activities” ( [Guideflow tutorial](https://www.guideflow.com/tutorial/how-to-deactivate-an-activity-type-in-pipedrive)). And Pipedrive’s API documentation says a type’s name can be changed, while its internal key is “generated… upon creation, and cannot be changed”; deleting a type through the API “marks an activity type as deleted” rather than erasing it ( [Pipedrive API reference: ActivityTypes](https://developers.pipedrive.com/docs/api/v1/ActivityTypes)). Put together: a type is an identity with a label on it. You can change the label. You can’t change what sits underneath.

Since the official help is silent here is how we would act on it.

Decide the list before you touch the picker. Changing types after six months of data is the expensive version of this exercise, because every report that compares this quarter to last quarter now compares two vocabularies. An hour with the team at the start, agreeing six names and what each means. Its cheaper than any cleanup.

If you inherit a long list, retire types rather than inventing new ones. Pick the name that survives, switch the others off, tell the team on a Monday and write that date down. The Knowledge Base doesn’t say what happens to old activities; the API’s soft delete points to them keeping the type they were logged under. Either way a year-over-year chart will have a seam. Your job is to know where it is, not to pretend there isn’t one.

Rename with care. The name is what reps see in the picker and what the report prints in the legend. Renaming “Follow up” to “Follow-up email” is a clarification. Renaming “Call” to “Demo” is a lie about every call logged before today. If the meaning changes, that is a new type and a retired one, not a rename.

## The list is the easy part

Writing the definitions down is what makes it stick. Six types fit in one pinned message or one line each in your sales playbook: “Call: any phone or video conversation outside a scheduled meeting, including unanswered.” That sentence does more for reps and thier managers than any dashboard setting.

We build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses; we started with Pipedrive. Deal Health, one of our products, scores each deal against more than 20 rules, and Activity is one of the rule categories. When a score drops, it names the factors behind the drop and suggests what to do about each one. Any analysis of activity data is only as clear as the words the data was logged in, which is one more reason to fix the vocabulary first. When the list is settled, [check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/).

And if you only do one thing this week, open Settings > Company settings > Activities and count. If the number is past seven, bring the list to your next team meeting and leave with six names.