How to (mis)use Pipedrive from sales to delivery at our startup company Adusso and beyond?

I wanted to figure out if I could set up another pipeline on Pipedrive for following up the stages after Sales Pipeline when a deal is won and begins to be delivered as a project, for example. This I named as Project Pipeline with stages Preparation, In progress, Delivered and Closed.

The problem is that just duplicating a deal and moving it to Project Pipeline won’t work, as either the sales statistics is lost, or the deal activities are not following into the delivery funnel (duplicating a deal will copy neither the days spent in different stages nor the activities and their content).

My requirements for handling these two pipelines and associated deals were:

• Original deal to be marked as won must retain all its content, most importantly the deal value and time spent at different stages to keep up Sales Pipeline statistics about deal flow.
• The new deal in Project Pipeline must get all the activities and notes from the original deal to maintain the communication history with the customer for seamless continuity from sales to delivery.

This is how I managed to do it:

1. Duplicate a deal in Sales Pipeline
2. Go to the original deal
3. Delete the original deal
4. Merge the deleted original deal with the copied deal by retaining the values of the copied deal in case of conflict
5. Select “All deleted deals” to be shown, go to the deleted original deal and reopen it
6. Mark the original deal as won
7. Go to the copied deal, rename it accordingly (e.g. “…deal (copy)” -> “project”) and move to Project Pipeline

Now we are able to “misuse” Pipedrive for maintaining a funnel about our customer projects and ongoing service delivery. The only tricky part is this seven-phase mouse-click procedure upon winning a deal, but it’s worth it as our deals are sizeable, typically with large healthcare providers or big Electronic Health Record system vendors. Hope this helps anybody who has already been considering the same or is looking for a simple view on all ongoing projects and deliveries on a dashboard-like view which Pipedrive has to offer.

P.S. Pipedrive provides an API that would make it possible to automate the transition of a deal from Sales Pipeline to Project Pipeline. I would be very happy to hear your thoughts if this could be implemented with the existing API commands. Please share!