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!