To change or to not change the due dates of activities, that is the question.

The most often debated topic when working with activities or tasks in CRMs like Pipedrive is whether you should change the due dates of overdue activities.

I will present what I think is the best thing to do with overdue tasks or activities.

Problem

On any given day, a salesperson has to do a number of tasks. Life happens and they may not be able to get through their tasks for the day, even if the number of tasks is manageable. Moreover, more often than not, salespeople are burdened with more tasks than they can handle. So any task they are not able to complete on a given day becomes an overdue task the next day.

The argument in favor of changing due dates is that people do not want to deal with the burden of having ‘overdue tasks’.

The biggest problem with moving due dates is that you lose context of how overdue you’re. On any given day, it is impossible to tell apart a task that is actually due for today from a task that was rescheduled for today. So there is a very high chance that activities that have been overdue for long will continue to be overdue because you will always have more activities than you can reasonably complete in a given day.

Secondly, it gives you a false impression that you’re on top of your sales pipeline and that things are fine when they’re actually not. The workload in the upcoming week far outweighs the workload in the weeks after.

So, my advice is to not move due dates. When you start your day, focus on everything that’s due for today. Once done, move to the Overdue list, and get cracking. Over time, you will get rid of overdues, but if you keep moving due dates of tasks, you will have to do this due date moving activity every day, which is a complete waste of time.

Scenarios where you need to change due dates

Apologies if this heading got you excited.

But I am going to rule out every case where you want to change the due date of the activity or, in simple words, move the activity.

Moving an activity without talking to a lead

Don’t do that.

If you do that, you’re asking the prospect to move according to your pace, where in fact, you should be responding to the prospect’s needs by moving along their pace.

Moving an activity when your outreach attempt was not successful

If your outreach attempt was unsuccessful, mark the activity as done, and schedule a new activity for a future date.

If you do that, you will get a clear idea of the number of attempts you’ve had to make to finally get in touch with somebody. This information will be very useful when you try to model “what happens if our leads increase by 10%”.

If you don’t do that, you will lose sight of how hard you’ve tried to reach out to somebody, and if you have tried enough. At some point, you have to give up on trying to reach out to a prospect, right?

Moving an activity with an incorrect due date

This one’s easy.

Just be careful when creating activities. Make it a habit to check these details when creating activities to avoid wasted time and effort, and frustration.

Be patient and diligent.

Moving an activity to follow up in the future

Again, don’t do that.

Just mark the previous activity as done, jot down your notes, and schedule the next activity. Let the logged data tell you and your team how many activities are required to get prospects into a particular stage of the pipeline. This will help them plan staffing requirements too.

Conclusion

My advice was always going to be ‘don’t do it’.

I just wanted to rule out every case one would think of to justify moving activities.

So, don’t do it.

It’s better to have overdue tasks than to move due dates of activities or tasks.

Last week I shared about how I started exploring what Claude and Pipedrive MCP could do. I ended up sending 40 emails to deals from my referral pipeline that were lost for a variety of reasons.

Today, I took it further.

I had a pile of lost deals in Pipedrive I wanted to revisit. Instead of doing it by hand or writing scripts against the Pipedrive API, I did it directly in Claude using the Pipedrive MCP connector. Here's what that looked like.

What Claude could do with MCP connected

Full read/write access to deals, persons, notes, activities, and custom fields. No Zapier, no CSV exports, no glue code. A few concrete things it did:

• Found an undocumented custom field. I have a custom "Skills" field on Persons. I asked Claude to read notes on 40+ deals, worked out which tool each lead needed (Glide, Zapier, Clay, etc.), and bulk-tagged every person record.
• Personalized outreach using deal notes. I narrowed down for one skill. For 25 lost deals, it pulled the notes, pulled out what the person actually asked for, and used that to write specific follow-ups instead of generic "just checking in" emails.
• Applied business logic I gave it. I shared a few scenarios to explore and asked it to write personalized email based on whether they were trying to build an internal app or a customer facing app, whether they were open on rebuilding the app from scratch, or whether they had moved on to other ideas and wanted suggestions of new platforms to build this with.

The actual workflow tip: Activities, not emails

I set up a Pipedrive automation that sends an email when an Activity is marked "done." So instead of Claude drafting emails in Gmail (tried this first — works, but doubles your review work), I had it create Activities in Pipedrive directly:

• Type: custom "Outreach" type
• Subject: email subject
• Note: full email body
• Linked to the right deal and person

Now I review everything inside Pipedrive. Mark it done, my existing automation sends it. Claude never touches my inbox, and I'm not keeping the same content in two places.

Why this matters

Most "AI + CRM" demos are read-only or single-step. This was multi-step, using real CRM state the whole way through: reading deal history, reverse-engineering a schema, cross-referencing deals/persons/notes/activities, and writing back in a format that plugs into automation I already had. All through one connector, no code.

Happy to answer questions.

Somebody asked a slightly tangential question about 'talking to a CRM' a couple of days ago.

I knew it was possible only by layering something atop MCPs.

So I started exploring Pipedrive’s MCP capabilities. I explored it myself with a use case I had been putting off out of sheer laziness.

I’ve referred quite a few leads to my referral partners over time, and I keep all of them in a dedicated 'referral' pipeline in Pipedrive.

Here’s what I did:

1. Fed Claude context about my pipeline and what I was trying to achieve (re-engaging lost deals with a fresh angle).
2. Asked it to pull the lost leads.
3. Had it review the notes on each deal.
4. Asked it to draft personalized follow-up emails with a different proposition.

Result?

I ended up sending 4 personalized emails to lost leads in one sitting.

The outputs were genuinely good — way better than I expected from a quick session.

I’m still learning the constraints (you have to be very specific about which fields to look at and how to interpret the values), but the potential is clear.

Tomorrow I’m planning to tackle the leads that never even responded to the initial outreach.

Has anyone else been using AI (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.) directly with their CRM for lead revival, email drafting, or pipeline cleanup?

Would love to hear what you have tried — use cases, tools, prompts, wins, or gotchas.

Cheers!