Every sales call ends with a promise. “I’ll send you the spec sheet.” “Let me check the lead time and come back to you.” Most of those promises are kept. The ones that aren’t are where deals go quiet, and nobody notices for three weeks. Pipedrive’s Nova now sits in the call, transcribes it and writes the important bits into the deal record on its own. I’m not going to walk you through the feature list. Here are three plays that turn those notes into money, and which one I’d run first.
Play 1: Never drop a promise you made on a call
The money: deals that stall because the follow-up a customer was promised never happened. They’re not lost to a competitor. They’re lost to a busy week.
How I’d run it:
- Turn Nova on for every external call, not just the big ones. The small calls are where promises slip.
- Make one rule: a call isn’t finished until the deal has a dated next action. Nova suggests one; the rep confirms or changes it before closing the record.
- Every Monday, filter for deals where the last call mentioned a promised item (spec sheet, revised price, lead time) and there’s no activity since. That’s your list of broken promises.
- Fix them before Tuesday lunch. The email is easy: “On our call last week I said I’d confirm the lead time. It’s six weeks from order.”
The maths, as an example: say your team has 40 open quotes averaging $15k, and one in ten stalls because a follow-up was forgotten. That’s four deals, $60k, sitting still. If keeping the promise saves even one of them a month, Nova has paid for itself many times over.
Play 2: Find the objection that keeps killing your quotes
The money: the same objection coming up on call after call, and nobody changes the quote, the price or the pitch to deal with it.
How I’d run it:
- Once a month, pull the objections Nova extracted from every call in the last 30 days.
- Group them roughly: price, lead time, spec, trust, timing. Count them. Don’t overthink the categories.
- Take the top one to your next sales meeting and decide one change. If “lead time” is top, quote a firm delivery date up front instead of waiting to be asked.
- Check next month whether that objection dropped.
The maths, as an example: if 40% of lost deals mention lead time and a firm date on the quote turns even a few of those around, that’s revenue from a sentence on a PDF, not a discount.
Play 3: Get new reps selling sooner
The money: the months a new rep spends learning what customers actually ask, while being paid and closing very little.
How I’d run it: give a new rep the Nova summaries from your best rep’s last 20 calls in their territory. Ask them to write down the five questions customers ask most and how the experienced rep answered each one. Then have them practise those answers before their own first calls. Reading 20 real summaries beats sitting in on two calls a week for a month.
How I’d actually do it
Start with Play 1. It needs no analysis and no new process beyond “no call closes without a dated next action,” and you’ll see the result in your stalled-deal count within a month. Play 2 comes once you have a few months of calls. Play 3 only matters when you’re hiring.
Here’s the caveat. Nova is reading a conversation, and it can mistake a polite “sounds interesting” for a commitment. For the first few weeks, have reps check what Nova wrote against their own memory of the call. And it doesn’t fix a pipeline with no stage rules. If nobody agrees what “quoted” means, Nova will faithfully record calls about deals in the wrong stage.
Where this fits
Nova captures the call; Pipedrive’s AI Sales Assistant acts on what’s captured, flagging stale deals and drafting the follow-up. If you’re on Gong instead, the Gong plays work the same way at a larger scale. If deals are going quiet because nobody owns them, that’s the work of CRM Pipeline Rescue.
What shipped, for reference: Nova records sales calls, transcribes them, extracts key points, updates CRM fields and suggests next steps. Available on all Pipedrive plans.
Source: Pipedrive.
