In short
The CRM existed. The strategy didn’t. This is how a referral-driven team went from logging deals to using them.
The situation
The private client division of a national insurance broker insures wealthy families. Most of their new clients come through referrals from wealth advisors, from other divisions, and from their own service staff, and some of those partners get a share of the revenue.
They had Pipedrive, the CRM where their deals and contacts live, but nobody owned it. It had been set up the way it came and left that way. Deals got logged, but there was no field for who referred them or which carrier wrote them, every producer used their own stages, and the revenue-share deals were tracked in a spreadsheet on the side. When leadership wanted a number, someone exported the deals and built it by hand. No two reports looked the same.
The COO wanted to know how healthy the pipeline was and where business was actually coming from. Then leadership set growth goals by vertical, team, and region, and the question got harder to avoid.
What I did
Assess. I sat with producers, associates, and the placement team and mapped how a new client and a broker-of-record transfer actually move through the division. Then I compared that to what Pipedrive was capturing. The gap was the whole problem. The handoffs that mattered weren’t stages, the people who mattered weren’t fields, and the built-in reports couldn’t answer the questions leadership was asking.
Design. I worked with leadership to decide what the CRM was for, then rebuilt it to match. One set of stages everyone uses, based on the real handoffs. New fields for referral source, partner, carrier, and revenue share. And the business definitions, what counts as a lead or a deal, what a joint venture is, what a win is, came out of Pipedrive’s reports and into a data model I controlled. That’s what let the reporting match how leadership thinks instead of how the tool happened to be configured.
Build. A daily feed pulls everything from Pipedrive, including every stage change, into one place and adds goals and budgets alongside it. The dashboard is in Power BI, because the firm already runs on Microsoft and I’d rather put the numbers where people already look than ask them to open something new. It goes from pipeline health to conversion to progress against goal. The partner reports come off the same data, generated each month as branded PDFs rather than assembled by hand, so they’re identical in format every time and nobody has to build them.
Adopt. There’s still no CRM admin, so the setup had to be one the team could run. I trained leaders and producers on both the new Pipedrive setup and the dashboards, and kept training as people joined. The partner reports ship with a glossary so anyone reading one knows what the numbers mean.
What changed
Before
- Reports built by hand when someone asked, no two alike
- Producers each ran their own pipeline stages
- Referrers, carriers, and revenue splits tracked outside the CRM or not at all
After
- One dashboard with pipeline, conversion, and progress to goal, updated every morning
- One pipeline, so leadership can see where deals stall
- Six referral partners get a monthly report on what their introductions turned into
The partner reports turned out to be the part people talk about. They go out under the division’s brand, and they tell each partner exactly what came of the business they sent. It makes the firm look organized, and it tells producers which relationships are worth the time.