Most CRMs are satisfied with a single API key. Pipedrive wants two things: a personal API token that belongs to one user rather than to the company, and the company domain your account answers on, because every Pipedrive account gets its own API address. With both in place, captured contacts arrive as Pipedrive Persons. Budget about 90 seconds.
What Pipedrive asks for, and why
- A personal API token. Pipedrive issues one token per user, not per app. It is scoped to your Pipedrive user, so the Persons it creates are owned by you and inherit exactly your permissions. If you are the admin, that is everything.
- Your company domain. Pipedrive routes API traffic through your account's own subdomain — requests go to
yourcompany.pipedrive.com, not to one shared API host. Anexus needs that address to know where to send them, which is why this integration has a second field where most CRMs have one. - Any Pipedrive plan works, free trial included. Token authentication sits beside your login, so an account that signs in through Google or SAML single sign-on still works normally.
Step 1 — Copy your personal API token
In Pipedrive, click your profile avatar (top right) → Personal preferences.
Switch to the API tab.
Copy the Your personal API token value. It is a 40-character string of letters and digits.
This is not a "create an app" flow. There is no OAuth client to register, no scopes to tick, no callback URL. If you have landed in Pipedrive's Developer Hub creating a public app, you have gone one door too far — back out to Personal preferences.
Step 2 — Read the company domain off your URL bar
The URL you use to log in to Pipedrive looks like https://yourcompany.pipedrive.com. What Anexus wants is the bare host: yourcompany.pipedrive.com — no https://, no path, no trailing slash.
A Pipedrive admin can rename that subdomain later under Company settings. The API address follows the rename, so if your team ever rebrands the Pipedrive URL, come back and update this field.
Step 3 — Paste both into Anexus
In Anexus, go to Settings → CRM Integrations → Pipedrive → Connect.
Fill in:
- Company domain:
yourcompany.pipedrive.com - Personal API token: the 40-character string
Click Save & connect.
Where the contacts land: the People list, not the Leads Inbox
Pipedrive keeps two separate holding areas that look alike to a newcomer: the Leads Inbox, a staging list for unqualified leads, and Contacts → People, the address book of Person records. New contacts from Anexus go to Contacts → People. Sort that view by Date added descending, or filter on "Recently added," and your newest captures are at the top.
Field mapping: capture form to Pipedrive Person
Every captured contact becomes a Pipedrive Person. Here is what goes where, and the Pipedrive quirk behind each row.
| Captured by Anexus | Lands in Pipedrive as | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| First + last name | Person → Name | A Pipedrive Person stores one combined Name string, not separate first and last columns. |
| Person → Email, marked primary with the "work" label | A Person can hold several email addresses; each carries a label (work / home / other) and exactly one is flagged primary. | |
| Phone (if provided) | Person → Phone | Same multi-value model as email — labelled numbers with one primary. Pipedrive does not reformat numbers, so whatever the visitor typed is what you will dial. |
| Company (if provided) | Person → Organization | Organization is a first-class object in Pipedrive, not free text — a Person's Organization field points at an Organization record, which is why company names are searchable under Contacts → Organizations. |
| Job title (if provided) | Person → job title, if your account has that field | Pipedrive's built-in Person fields are Name, Organization, Email, Phone and Label — job title is not among them. Most teams add one under Company settings → Data fields → Person. If a title you expected is missing from a synced Person, check there first that the field exists. |
| Message (if the visitor wrote one) | Sent with the contact | Anexus sends the message text along with the rest of the captured details. It is not one of Pipedrive's built-in Person fields, so do not expect a column for it in the People table view. |
| Capture source (NFC tap, QR scan, Apple Wallet, shared link) | A note marking the source | Anexus records how the contact reached you — a tap, a scan, an Apple Wallet pass or a shared link — so you can tell later where a Person came from. |
Contacts without a valid email address are skipped rather than pushed, and private notes you write inside the Anexus Mini CRM stay in Anexus.
Persons, Deals and your pipeline board
Pipedrive is built around Deals. A Deal sits in a Stage of a Pipeline, and the pipeline board is what most Pipedrive users stare at all day. Persons and Organizations are the address book sitting behind that board.
A Person on its own does not appear on any pipeline board — in Pipedrive nothing shows on the board until a Deal is attached to it. So decide up front who opens the Deal for a fresh capture, and into which Pipeline and Stage it goes.
The same logic applies to Pipedrive's Activities. Pipedrive's whole methodology is that every open Deal carries a scheduled next Activity — a call, a meeting, an email — and that is what drives its reminders. A brand-new Person carries no Activity, so Pipedrive will never nag you about it. If a captured contact matters, put an Activity on it the same day you meet them.
Duplicates, and why Pipedrive lets them happen
We look up existing Persons by email first, so the same visitor submitting your form twice updates the existing Person rather than creating a second one.
Pipedrive itself, though, does not enforce unique email addresses on Persons. Your People list can happily hold three Persons sharing one address, and Pipedrive only surfaces them through its manual Merge duplicates tool. If your People list is already messy, run that clean-up before you connect — email is the key the match runs on, so a tidy list gives you tidy results.
Backfilling contacts captured before you connected
Click Sync past contacts on the Pipedrive card to push everything captured before the connection, in batches of 50 Persons.
Pipedrive meters API usage per company, and every integration you run — Zapier, Make, custom scripts, this one — draws from the same budget. If a big backfill coincides with another tool doing bulk work, Pipedrive will be the one slowing things down.
Troubleshooting Pipedrive
"Pipedrive rejected the token (check the company domain too)"
Because there are two fields, this message has two possible causes:
- Token typo. Re-copy it from Personal preferences → API. A trailing space picked up by the copy is the classic culprit.
- Wrong domain shape. It must be the bare host
yourcompany.pipedrive.com— nothttps://yourcompany.pipedrive.com, not a deep link you copied from a Deal, notapp.pipedrive.com. - The subdomain was renamed. If an admin changed the company URL in Company settings, the token is still valid but the address no longer resolves. Log in, look at the URL bar, paste the new host.
It worked yesterday and stopped today
Pipedrive's API screen has a Regenerate button, and regenerating instantly kills the previous token. Anyone who clicked it — you, or an admin tidying up security — breaks every tool using that token at once, because Pipedrive gives each user one token rather than one per integration. The same thing happens if that Pipedrive user is deactivated or loses their seat: the token dies with the user. Hit Test on the Anexus card to confirm, then paste a fresh token.
The token authenticates but nothing gets created
A personal token carries exactly its owner's permissions and nothing more. If your Pipedrive admin has put your user in a restricted permission set, the connection can validate cleanly and still be refused on the write. Either ask an admin to loosen your permission set, or connect using a token from a user who is allowed to create Persons and Organizations.
You can see the new Persons, your colleagues cannot
Persons created with your token are owned by your Pipedrive user. On accounts that use visibility groups, teammates outside your group will not find them in their filters — the records exist, they are just not visible to that person. Change the record's visibility, or reassign the owner, inside Pipedrive.
Disconnecting, and actually killing the token
Click Disconnect in Anexus and we stop pushing to Pipedrive straight away. The Persons already created stay where they are.
To revoke access from Pipedrive's side you have to regenerate the token at Personal preferences → API → Regenerate. Read that as a warning, not a step: because Pipedrive issues one token per user, regenerating cuts off every other integration signed in as you at the same moment. If Zapier, Make or a homegrown script is using that token, plan to re-paste the new value everywhere before you press it.