Pipedrive CRM Trends Report 2026 finds admin work dominates sales roles

Pipedrive released its CRM Trends Report 2026 on August 4, 2026. The report is based on a national online survey of 1,000 U.S. sales and marketing professionals conducted in June 2026, all of whom use a CRM or work where the sales team uses one. According to the company, nearly four times as many respondents focus on logging calls, emails and meetings as on advancing conversations and closing deals, and 42% say non-revenue-generating tasks take at least 40% of their day. Fourteen percent of professionals whose CRM includes AI never use those features, with 8% unaware they exist and 6% choosing not to use them.

The details

• 11% count closing deals among their most frequent weekly activities, compared with 38% who spend most of their time logging calls, emails and meetings.
• 85% work late at least once a week; 34% of Gen Z respondents work late three to four days a week, compared with 24% of Millennials and Gen X.
• 79% switch between multiple tools to see a full customer account, and 62% of teams say this causes a missed deal or action every week.
• 65% expect to increase their AI use this year, and automated data entry is the most requested AI capability at 15%.
• Email marketing is the largest inbound lead source at 22%, ahead of organic social at 15% and referrals and paid advertising at 13% each.
• Chief Product and Technology Officer Joe Futty is quoted in the release.

Context

The report came one day before Pipedrive announced its acquisition of Outfunnel, its top-rated marketplace app, on August 5, and five weeks after it launched a native MCP server on June 30, 2026. Two weeks later its MCP Connector was listed in Claude's connector marketplace, and in September Pipedrive launched Nova meeting intelligence across all plans.

Not disclosed

• Respondent breakdown by company size, role and industry
• Which CRM products respondents use
• Margin of error
• Who fielded the survey