Just as the Pipedrive permission sets we covered in a separate article dictate what users can do, the Pipedrive visibility groups dictate what users on your account can see. It is right next to Pipedrive automations and even the fundamental aspects of maximizing the ROI of Pipedrive, such as building the Pipedrive account structure.
In this article, we’ll explain how to make the most of visibility settings in Pipedrive. We’ll start by exploring the concept of ownership in Pipedrive, which serves as the foundation for understanding visibility. We’ll also cover the business case for creating visibility groups and provide practical tips and examples on configuring visibility settings in your account. Let’s get started!
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Why care about visibility settings in Pipedrive?
An efficient sales process hinges on minimizing distractions. Pipedrive’s visibility settings help achieve this by controlling what your teams and users can see, reducing noise and lowering the risk of data breaches.
As a side note in the business context of visibility, it’s important to mention that choosing a specific visibility strategy is rooted in your company culture and values. For example, if you have a small team and value transparency and independence, you might choose to make every item visible to everyone in the company.
Here are a few practical benefits our partners gain from using this feature as part of the Pipedrive Booster 2.0 implementation package.
Data security
Visibility features ensure that sensitive information is accessed only by designated employees. By restricting the visibility of certain contacts, deals, or leads, these features can reduce the risk of data breaches, prevent data misuse, and help comply with regulations like GDPR.
Sales efficiency
Controlling visibility also helps reduce information overload, allowing sales reps to focus on relevant deals rather than being distracted by unrelated opportunities. This improves the sales workflow. By building a more detailed visibility tree, managers can align the visibility of specific entities, such as leads, deals, or contacts, with the skill level or experience of individual sales representatives. For instance, newer salespeople may not be involved in complex deals until they gain more experience.
Territorial, regional ,or vertical sales teams
We often see companies segment their markets by region, product line, or customer type. Visibility controls help ensure that sales reps see only the deals and leads relevant to their specific territory or segment, preventing overlap and deal management disputes.
Preventing internal competition
When everyone in the company has visibility access to everything, it can sometimes lead to demotivation as reps see more lucrative opportunities being assigned to others on the team. This can cause salespeople to engage in internal politics or competitive games to gain access to the best leads, distracting them from working on the leads assigned to them. By restricting visibility, companies can ensure that leads are distributed in a way that minimizes friction within the team.
The key aspects of visibility in Pipedrive
Pipedrive’s notion of ownership
The concept of visibility groups is closely tied to how Pipedrive understands ownership. If you own a specific item in Pipedrive—such as a lead, deal, or another key entity represented as a Contact or Deal with specific data—you can view and manage everything related to it. Therefore, the visibility strategy primarily addresses this question: What should non-owner users be able to see in their accounts?
Company-wide or user-specific approach?
The first decision when implementing a visibility strategy in Pipedrive is whether you want individual users to manage their own visibility or if you prefer a centralized approach, where visibility settings are managed for all users.
If you choose the independent route, where each user sets their own visibility, your role in managing company-wide visibility ends once you grant permission for users to adjust their own settings. For guidance on this, refer to our article on setting up Pipedrive permissions and permission groups.
The second option is to manage visibility settings company-wide, which is the approach we recommend. The specifics of how you implement visibility levels will depend mainly on your pricing plan (we cover that below).
However you implement your visibility preferences, remember that these settings also affect reports and dashboards in the Insights section, as covered in our article on Pipedrive Insights module reporting. Any limitations set for specific users will extend to reports, restricting their ability to create or view certain reports.
Implementing robust visibility settings in Pipedrive
In Pipedrive, you can control the visibility of certain items through visibility groups. A visibility group determines the visibility of items for specific entities, such as leads, deals, people, organizations, and products. In other words, it instructs Pipedrive to show or hide certain elements for specific users.
That said, Pipedrive does handle some of these decisions for you. Users with the Deals admin permission, as covered in the previous entry on Pipedrive permission sets, always have full visibility of leads and deals. Meanwhile, items related to people, organizations, and products are fully visible by default to users with the Global admin permission set.
Subscription plan limitations on visibility settings
The pricing plan you have affects the number of visibility groups you can create, as shown in the table below.
| Plan | Number of groups |
| Essential | – |
| Advanced | – |
| Professional | 3 |
| Power | 15 |
| Enterprise | Unlimited |
Clearly, if you have an Essential or Advanced plan, you cannot create any custom visibility groups. The only options available are to switch between narrow, item-owner visibility and super-wide, company-wide visibility for a certain resource.
With the Professional, Power, or Enterprise plans, you can create additional visibility groups and sub-groups if needed, for more detailed visibility breakdowns in your Pipedrive account.
From our experience, even companies with Enterprise plans rarely create more than 10 visibility groups, so that Unlimited in the Enterprise plan should really be taken with a grain of salt. You don’t need a lot of visibility groups to have a secure and clean Pipedrive account.
Best practices for visibility group implementations
We recommend that our clients working on Pipedrive implementations set their visibility groups to reflect their company’s divisions of responsibility, such as lead generation, lead qualification, sales, and back office. If your plan limits the number of groups you can create, prioritize visibility for lead and deal resources and pipelines first. Next, focus on organization and person (contact) visibility, with product visibility being the lowest priority.
Pipeline visibility is an aspect we often see companies overlook. By default, all visibility groups have access to all pipelines, which may not be ideal. You can restrict which pipelines certain users are allowed to see. Each visibility group has a dedicated setting to control pipeline visibility exclusively. If you remove a pipeline from a visibility group, users added to that group will not see any trace of deals or activity in that pipeline. This feature can be used to great effect, as discussed below.
Implementation strategies for company-wide Pipedrive visibility groups
Here are a couple of approaches to building your visibility groups. While these are not the only options, we find them to be useful generalizations of the main approaches to this issue.
Approach 1: Vertical visibilities (role-based visibility groups)
The vertical visibility approach involves creating visibility groups based on specific roles within your organization. This method is effective for companies that need to ensure that each team member only has access to the information that is relevant to their job. By structuring visibility groups in this way, you can improve workflows, enhance focus, and maintain data security by limiting access to sensitive information.
This approach works even if you have a Professional plan and can only create up to three groups. Let’s see an example.
Group 1: Sales Representatives
- Visibility Access: Leads, Deals, and Contacts (Organizations, People)
- Purpose: This group ensures that sales reps have all the necessary data to track the sales pipeline, follow up with prospects, and close deals.
Group 2: Marketing Team
- Visibility Access: Contacts (Organizations, People)
- Purpose: By granting visibility to contacts, marketers can access the necessary data to segment audiences, plan targeted campaigns, and see what’s triggering engagement.
Group 3: Customer Support and Back Office
- Visibility Access: Products, Contacts (Organizations, People)
- Purpose: Customer support and back-office teams focus on post-sale activities, including customer service, troubleshooting, and product management.
Approach 2: Horizontal visibilities (project or pipeline based)
This approach works in companies where sales teams or departments are segmented based on different verticals, industries, or project types.
Let’s suppose that in your organization, each sales team can be specialized in different industries, such as Technology, Healthcare, or Finance. You would create a dedicated pipeline for each industry, ensuring that only the relevant sales team has visibility into their own pipeline. In Pipedrive, you can create as many pipelines as you want regardless of your plan.
Example: Suppose you have three sales teams—Team A, B, and C—specialized in Technology, Healthcare, and Finance, respectively. You would create three distinct pipelines:
- Pipeline 1: Tech sales
- Pipeline 2: Healthcare sales
- Pipeline 3: Finance sales
Let’s say you have the minimum plan that allows for the creation of visibility groups—Professional (3 groups max). In this plan, you would assign each group access to its own pipeline only (Group 1 – Tech; Group 2 – Healthcare; Group 3 – Finance). Each team operates within its designated pipeline, ensuring minimizing distractions from unrelated deals or leads.
As an alternative example, let’s suppose your company works on a project basis or in cases where specific sales processes are temporary and time-based. In this scenario, each project can be assigned its own pipeline too. This approach is particularly useful for companies managing multiple sales projects simultaneously, where each project has its own unique sales cycle.
Example: Consider a company with three ongoing projects—Project Alpha, Project Beta, and Project Gamma. You can set up:
- Pipeline 1: Project Alpha
- Pipeline 2: Project Beta
- Pipeline 3: Project Gamma
Just as before, we’d allocate each project to a specific visibility group:
- Group 1: Access to pipeline 1 (Project Alpha)
- Group 2: Access to pipeline 2 (Project Beta)
- Group 3: Access to pipeline 3 (Project Gamma)
Approach 3: Combined horizontal and vertical visibility (project or pipeline based)
This approach will be especially useful if your subscription plan is higher than Professional, as it combines both horizontal and vertical visibility approaches, resulting in more granular visibility settings.
First, create a top-level visibility group for each pipeline. This ensures that each major pipeline, representing different projects, industries, or sales channels, has its own dedicated visibility group.
Example: Let’s say you have pipelines for Enterprise, SMB, and International sales. Create corresponding top-level visibility groups:
- Group 1: Enterprise sales pipeline
- Group 2: SMB sales pipeline
- Group 3: International sales pipeline
Each of these top-level groups controls access to the associated pipeline, ensuring that teams assigned to these groups only see data relevant to their focus area.
Once the top-level groups are established, you can create sub-groups under each pipeline to manage specific entity types such as Leads, Deals, Contacts, or Products. This allows for more nuanced access control.
Example: Under the Enterprise sales pipelines group, you might create:
- Sub-Group 1: Leads in Enterprise sales
- Sub-Group 2: Deals in Enterprise sales
- Sub-Group 3: Contacts in Enterprise sales
Finally, once you’ve created your groups, you can go ahead and invite your users to their designed groups. For example:
- Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) might only have access to the Leads sub-group.
- Account Executives could be placed in the Deals sub-group.
- Customer Success Managers (CSMs) might have access to the Contacts sub-group.
This setup ensures that each user sees only the data they need to perform their job, reducing clutter and improving efficiency. It uses the inheritance model built into Pipedrive’s visibility settings. In this model, sub-groups inherit visibility settings from their parent group. This means that if a user is part of a sub-group with restricted access, they won’t be able to see information outside what’s permitted by the parent group.
Implementation strategies for item-specific visibility groups
There are instances where the visibility of a specific item doesn’t follow the general visibility rules you’ve configured in your account. Fortunately, Pipedrive provides an easy solution: you can edit the item’s visibility using the “visible-to” setting. That little four-square icon at the top of the detail or list view of a specific item? That’s it—see below:
Pipedrive visibility groups should be fully transparent now
We’ve just wrapped up another deep dive into Pipedrive’s features. While our comprehensive guides on crafting a robust Pipedrive account structure with over 100 examples or our in-depth look at Pipedrive automations with dozens of detailed cases might be a bit more intense, this one’s a bit more straightforward and easier to digest.
Just remember that proper visibility configuration ensures users have the appropriate access, minimizes overlap, and aligns visibility with your organization’s needs, improving data security and efficiency. It also makes things easier and cleaner. That’s why it’s crucial to take a moment to consider this carefully to maximize the value of your Pipedrive account.
Ah, and a little tip—configuring very specific visibility groups is one of the most important aspects of our Pipedrive implementation package, Pipedrive Booster 2.0 (yep, it’s already in its second generation). Check out the package and schedule a strategy session to get the maximum value from your account. The best part: the Omni Mini package plan is completely free (click below to see for yourself)!
Photo attribution
As usual, the featured image of the article is a photograph that corresponds with the article’s topic. This time, the shoutout goes to Hunter Harritt on Unsplash
