# Pipedrive notes that survive a handoff: mentions, pinned notes, and where a mention can’t reach https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-notes-mentions-pinned-handoff/ Published: 2026-10-04 · Updated: 2026-10-25 In Pipedrive, typing @ and a colleague’s name inside a note sends them a notification, in the notifications panel and by email, and a pinned note stays at the top of the item’s history ( [Pipedrive: mentions and comments](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/mentions-and-comments-beta); [Pipedrive: adding notes](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/how-can-i-add-notes-to-a-deal-or-contact)). Those two features are enough to keep a deal’s internal conversation inside the deal instead of in a chat, with one hard limit: a mention does not reach a person who can’t see the deal. You get an error, they get nothing. ## The question that lived in a chat A made-up case, but we have watched versions of it. Maren is closing a deal with a logistics company. On a Tuesday she asks Wren Adeyemi, in a direct message, whether legal will accept the buyer’s data-processing addendum. Wren answers on Wednesday: yes, with two edits. Maren forwards the edits to the buyer from her inbox, and the deal moves to Negotiation. Three weeks later Maren is on leave and the buyer asks about the second edit. Whoever opens the deal sees a stage change, a sent email and a note from the first call. The legal answer exists, but it lives in a chat between two people, one of whom is away. Our rule for avoiding this is short: the question goes to a person, the answer goes to the deal. Pipedrive gives you one mechanism for each. A [customer thread on WhatsApp has the same problem](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-whatsapp-integration/), and the answer still belongs on the deal. ## A pinned note is the deal’s current state Most notes in a deal are a log. They say what happened on a date, and they slowly scroll out of view. A pinned note stays at the top of the history no matter what comes after it ( [Pipedrive: adding notes](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/how-can-i-add-notes-to-a-deal-or-contact)), and the deal detail view also shows it in Focus ( [Pipedrive: deal detail view](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/deal-detail-view)). So its the first thing anyone reads when they open the deal. That makes it the right place for a state. We treat the pinned note as the answer to one question: if someone else had to run this deal from tomorrow morning, what do they need to know that the fields don’t say? The decision that was made and why. The thing the buyer is waiting for. The internal answer that took a week to get. The last agreed next step, in case the activity gets rescheduled and loses its context. Keep one note on top at a time. Between handoffs that is usually the latest [five-line call note](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-call-notes-minimum/): pin the new one and unpin the old, and the old one stays in the history. When the deal is about to change hands, the note on top becomes the handoff note below. If it grows to the length of a briefing document, it has turned back into a log. In Maren’s deal, one line on top, “Legal OK on the buyer’s DPA with two edits, sent 14 May, see note of that date,” would have ended the whole problem. Pinning is a discipline, not a setting, and a stale pinned note is worse than none because the next reader trusts it. In a pipeline review, asking when the pinned note was last touched takes thirty seconds. ## @mention: who gets pinged, and where A mention is for the question. Type @ in a note or comment and pick a name, or use the @ button at the bottom of the notes section; the list shows up to eight users at a time, so on a larger team you keep typing to narrow it ( [Pipedrive: mentions and comments](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/mentions-and-comments-beta)). The person you mention gets a notification. So does the author of a note when someone comments on it, and anyone who already commented on that note when a new comment lands. Notifications show up in the notifications panel and by email, depending on each user’s settings. A mention is not an assignment. Nothing lands in the colleague’s activity list and nothing is due. If Wren actually has to do something by Thursday, that’s an activity on the deal, assigned to Wren, with a date, and the mention is just the sentence that explains it. What you gain over a direct message is where the answer lands. Wren replies in a comment under Maren’s note, in the deal, so the question, the answer and the date sit where the next owner will look. Maren then lifts the conclusion into the pinned note. Two steps instead of one, and the second is the one that survives. On leads, mentions work but comments don’t, so the reply has to be a new note rather than a threaded comment ( [Pipedrive: mentions and comments](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/mentions-and-comments-beta)). It reads a little worse. It still beats a chat. ## Two places a mention doesn’t reach The first one bites during a handoff. If the person you mention can’t see the deal or the items linked to it, you get an error and they never see the mention ( [Pipedrive: mentions and comments](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/mentions-and-comments-beta)). Finding out at the moment you try beats silence but the question still didn’t go anywhere. Expect it when the colleague you need sits outside the deal’s visibility: a finance person, a specialist from another team, a new hire who isn’t set up yet. The fix is in your visibility settings, and that call belongs to whoever owns your Pipedrive setup, not to a rep in a hurry. How we cover an absent rep’s deals is in [covering a rep’s deals with followers](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-followers-rep-out-of-office/). The second is a permission. To see mentions, a user needs “See other users’ data” in their global permissions ( [Pipedrive: mentions and comments](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/mentions-and-comments-beta)). If your account has that switched off for some users, those users are also out of the conversation. ![Two columns: who a mention reaches (colleague with deal access, user with data permission, lead) and who it misses (outside visibility, no permission)](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/pipedrive-notes-mentions-pinned-handoff-2.png) ## Pipedrive notes limits: 100 notes, 100 KB A deal, lead, person or organization holds up to 100 notes. An activity holds one. Each note can be up to 100 KB, and a note that goes over is split into several notes automatically ( [Pipedrive: adding notes](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/how-can-i-add-notes-to-a-deal-or-contact)). 100 KB is a lot of text, so the size limit mostly matters for pasted transcripts, and a note that gets auto-split is a note nobody will read. A long deal with a chatty team can get near 100 notes, which is one more reason to keep the conclusions in one note on top rather than scattered across forty. The one-note-per-activity rule is why call notes belong on the deal, not inside the activity. One more thing from the same help page: you can’t add an image to a note on a lead or an activity, so the screenshot of the buyer’s pricing page goes on the the deal or the person. ## A handoff note in five lines This is the pinned note we ask for before any deal changes hands, whether the owner is leaving, going on holiday or passing the deal to a closer. The reassignment itself is covered in [reassigning a departing rep’s Pipedrive deals](https://salesbond.app/blog/rep-leaves-reassign-pipedrive-deals/); this is only the note that travels with each deal. 1. Where we are, in one sentence a stranger would understand. “Proposal sent 2 June, buyer’s procurement reviewing, verbal yes from the ops lead.” 2. What the buyer is waiting for from us, and what we’re waiting for from them. If the answer is “nothing”, write that: it tells the new owner the deal is drifting. 3. Internal decisions already made, with the date and where to find them. The legal answer, the discount approval, the delivery date someone promised. 4. People on the buyer’s side: who is for us, who is quiet, and whether we’re talking to more than one of them. If it’s one name, say so; [a single-threaded deal](https://salesbond.app/blog/single-threaded-deals/) is the new owner’s first problem. 5. The agreed next step and its date, matching the [next activity on the deal](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-next-activity/). If the note and the activity disagree, the new owner doesn’t know which to trust. Then the current owner mentions the new owner in a comment on that note, so the handoff itself is in the deal, with a timestamp. If the mention errors, the new owner can’t see the deal yet, and you’ve found that out while the old owner is still at their desk. ## When a chat thread is still the better tool Some teams run a Slack or Teams channel per big deal, with a sales engineer, finance and the rep all in it, and that conversation moves faster than any comment thread in a CRM. If that’s your team, keep the thread and add one rule: anything the thread decides gets written into the deal by the rep the same day, and the note on top gets updated to match. The failure mode isn’t using chat. It’s using chat as the only copy. We build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses; we started with Pipedrive. Its Deal Health checks every deal against more than 20 rules and shows the specific problem on each one. It won’t write the handoff note for you, and nothing will. Write the five lines on the next deal that might change hands, before anyone goes on leave.