# Pipedrive bulk activities: one batch of follow-ups for 60 stalled deals, without wrecking your activity numbers

https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-bulk-activities-follow-up-batch/
Published: 2026-10-04 · Updated: 2026-10-20

In a Pipedrive list of deals, contacts or leads, select up to 100 records, click **Schedule activities**, set the type, due date, priority and note, and save ( [Pipedrive: how can I create activities in bulk](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/how-can-i-create-activities-in-bulk)). The composer can split the batch into groups of 5 to 40 activities per day, with an option to skip weekends, so a rep does not open Monday to sixty identical tasks. The part the Help Center leaves to you is the part that decides whether the batch helps: filter the deals first, write a note a rep can act on, and count the batch by what gets done, not by what got created.

## Sixty deals with no next step, and a Friday afternoon

The scene is invented, but we have watched versions of it more than once. A sales manager, call her Lena, spends Friday afternoon cleaning the pipeline. She builds a filter: open deals, next activity date is empty. Sixty deals come back. Some are three weeks old, some are from the spring. Every one of them is a deal nobody has a plan for.

Without bulk scheduling, Lena had two options. Open sixty deals one by one and add a call to each, which is an evening. Or send the list to the reps with “please schedule a next step on these,” which is a Slack message that dies by Tuesday.

Now she has a third option. Select all sixty, schedule a call, save. Ten seconds. On Monday morning Dev, who owns forty of those deals, opens his activity list and finds forty calls, all due today, all titled “Call”, with no note. What do you do with forty instructions that say nothing? He ignores them, or he marks them done in a row to make the red go away.

The tool did exactly what it was asked. The ask was wrong.

## Where the button lives and what the Help Center says it can do

Bulk activity creation works from the deals, contacts and leads list views, plus the sent folder of Sales Inbox ( [Pipedrive: how can I create activities in bulk](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/how-can-i-create-activities-in-bulk)). Sales Inbox is the exception: there the same selection creates completed email activities from conversations you already had, so it is a logging tool, not a follow-up tool. For deals, contacts and leads the steps are:

1. Open the list and select the records. The limit is 100 at a time, so a bigger list means several batches.
2. Click **Schedule activities**.
3. In the composer, set the activity title, type, due date and time, priority, a note, the assignee, and a video call link if the activity is a meeting. That field list comes from Pipedrive’s help page on adding activities in bulk from the deal list ( [Pipedrive: add activities in bulk](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/add-activities-bulk) ).
4. Decide whether all activities land on one day or get spread across several days.
5. Click **Save activities**.

For the priority field in step three, we wrote down [which priority to give the batch](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-activity-priority-labels/).

Two conditions apply. The user needs the **Bulk edit items** permission, and the feature’s availability depends on the plan ( [Pipedrive: add activities in bulk](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/add-activities-bulk)). If a rep tells you the button is not there, it is one of those two.

Notice what the composer does not have: a per-deal note. One note goes on every activity in the batch. That is the single biggest constraint on how to use it, and it shapes everything below.

## Pick the deals first

The batch is only as good as the list under it, so the work starts in the filter, not in the composer. A batch of sixty is a statement: “these sixty deals need the same thing from a rep this week.” If that sentence is not true for the whole list, the batch is the wrong tool for part of it. For a batch on contacts rather than deals, the [overdue contacts on the timeline](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-contacts-timeline-follow-up-frequency/) are a ready-made starting list.

Lena’s filter, open deals with an empty next activity date, is a good start and a bad finish. Sixty deals with no next step are not sixty deals that need a call. Some need a “did the proposal arrive” email. Some are dead and need a lost reason, not an activity. A few are waiting on the customer’s board meeting in November, and a call on Tuesday will annoy a buyer who already told the rep the date. Those deals need the activity scheduled for November, by the rep, with the context in the note. We wrote about the next activity field as a pipeline rule in [why every open deal needs a next activity](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-next-activity/); the batch is one way to enforce it, not a way to skip the thinking.

So the filter gets narrower. Open deals, next activity empty, stage is Proposal sent or later, last updated more than 14 days ago. That cut takes Lena from sixty to twenty-three. Every one of those is a deal where a proposal is sitting with the buyer and nobody has asked about it in two weeks. One note fits all of them: “Proposal has been out 14+ days with no activity. Call, ask where the decision stands, update the expected close date or mark lost.” A rep can act on that without opening the the deal history first.

The remaining thirty-seven deals get a different treatment. The early-stage ones get their own smaller batch with a different note, or nothing: a deal that was created last week and has no activity yet is a Monday-morning conversation with the rep, not a task. The stale ones in Qualified from April are a lost-reason exercise, and that is a [bulk edit with its own risks](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-bulk-edit-safety/).

The order matters: filter, read the list, decide what the one note says, then select. If you cannot write one note that is true for every selected deal, split the selection until you can. In practice that produces two or three batches of ten to thirty, each with a note a rep would write themselves. It never produces one batch of sixty.

## Spread them out

Twenty-three calls due Monday is still a bad Monday. The composer’s answer is the day split: instead of one due date, the batch is distributed over days at a rate you set, from 5 to 40 per day, and you can skip weekends ( [Pipedrive: how can I create activities in bulk](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/how-can-i-create-activities-in-bulk)). Twenty-three at five a day is five Monday to Thursday and three on Friday.

![Diagram: 23 follow-up calls split across the week, 5 a day Monday to Thursday and 3 on Friday, weekends left empty](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/pipedrive-bulk-activities-follow-up-batch-2.png)

How many per day is a question about the rep’s existing calendar, not about the batch. A rep who already makes twelve outbound calls a day can absorb five more. A rep who runs demos most of the afternoon cannot. Ask the number, do not guess it.

Then the assignee. The composer has an assignee field that is applied to the whole batch ( [Pipedrive: add activities in bulk](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/add-activities-bulk)), so check who it is set to before you save. Our rule: the assignee is the deal owner. If the field says Lena because its her list, twenty-three calls on deals she does not own end up on her list instead of the reps’. If the batch mixes three owners, filter by owner and run the batch three times, once per rep, with that rep as assignee and that rep’s daily number.

When the batch has more than five activities, Pipedrive shows them in a calendar where you can drag individual activities to another day ( [Pipedrive: add activities in bulk](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/add-activities-bulk)). This is where the plan meets reality: Thursday is the team meeting, so Thursday’s five move to Wednesday and Friday. The drag takes a few seconds. Skip it and the rep reschedules on Monday, one activity at a time, which is the evening you were trying to avoid.

A smaller point that saves grief: set a due time as well as a date, or drag the activities into time slots on that calendar. A follow-up with no time tends to float around the day and lose to every real meeting. Nine in the morning is a fine default for a call block. The rep’s [activity reminders](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-activity-reminders/) then do their job.

## Created is not done: reading the week after a batch

Here is the number that lies. On Friday Lena’s team had, say, 140 scheduled activities for the coming week. On Monday it has 163. Nothing happened. No rep decided to call anyone, and the pipeline did not get healthier. A manager who looks at “activities added this week” sees a jump, and the rep who owns the most stale deals suddenly leads the chart.

A batch of twenty-three “Call” activities is twenty-three intentions, not twenty-three calls. So read that week by completed activities, and check each one against what it was supposed to produce: an updated close date, a stage move, a lost reason. We covered a cousin of this problem in [auto-logged emails](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-email-activities-activity-report-inflated/); here the extra count comes from tasks a manager typed in ten seconds.

Completed is not safe on its own either. If Dev’s forty calls are all marked done between 9:00 and 9:04 on Monday, that is one rep clearing a list, and it shows up as a perfect week. Two checks catch it. First, the note: ask reps to replace the batch note with one line of outcome when they mark done (“left voicemail”, “decision moved to Q1”, “lost to in-house”). A done activity with the manager’s original note still in it was not a call. Second, the deal: a completed follow-up on a proposal should move something, and a deal with a done follow-up and the same expected close date it had in August was not followed up, it was ticked. If activity counts are on your team dashboard at all, [these are the three worth keeping](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-activity-metrics-small-team/).

One more habit. Write down the batch: date, filter, count, note, assignee, days. A line in the team channel is enough. When that week’s activity report looks odd a month later, whoever reads it will know why, and won’t credit or blame a rep for a Friday afternoon decision that was never theirs.

## When not to run a batch

The batch earns its place for rare events: a trade show with fifty new leads and one script, a pipeline cleanup like Lena’s, a rep leaving and the new owner needing a first touch on every inherited deal. It is the wrong tool whenever the next step depends on what the last conversation was about. Signs you are about to misuse it:

- The note you are writing contains the word “appropriate”, as in “take the appropriate next step”. That note says nothing.
- You are selecting deals you have not read, because the list is long and Friday is short.
- The batch is standing in for a conversation with the rep about why sixty deals had no next step in the first place.

That last one is where we think the real work is. A batch fixes the symptom for one week. If the same filter returns sixty deals again in a month, the problem is not that nobody scheduled follow-ups; it is that scheduling the next activity is not part of how the team closes a call. We build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses. Its Deal Health checks every deal in the monitored scope against more than 20 rules in categories including Activity, and shows each violation with a recommended action. [Check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/) if you want to see that picture for your pipeline today.

Either way the batch itself stays small, specific and spread out. One filter, one note that is true for every deal in it, the deal owner as assignee, five or so per day, and the report read by what got done. Run it that way and it saves an evening. Run it as “select all, Call, Monday” and it costs a week of a rep’s trust in the task list, which is more expensive than the evening was.