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    Vita Brevis Fine Art logo
    Fine art portrait studio (United States)

    Vita Brevis Fine Art

    Pipedrive as the cockpit: booking, check-in, orders, calling campaigns and reporting, all from the deal

    Pipedrive Platinum PartnerBuilt by Sales Surge, Pipedrive Platinum Partner
    In short

    Vita Brevis Fine Art, a portrait studio in Colorado Springs, now runs its whole business from Pipedrive. Bookers book a session and take the $250 reservation fee inside the deal. Clients check in on an iPad, ProSelect orders land on the deal, JustCall dials campaigns that refill from Pipedrive 4 times a day, and Surge Reports shows it all in 7 tabs.

    How did it start?

    Vita Brevis Fine Art is a portrait studio in Colorado Springs, United States, with two brands: Vita Brevis Fine Art and Love Pets Portraits. Clients book a design session, pay a reservation fee, and the studio produces the fine art portraits. In April 2026 the studio signed with Sales Surge for a RevOps switchover of 22 weeks: a new Pipedrive implementation, with two apps built into Pipedrive, a rebuilt calling flow and reporting across every source. Delivery was on 26 September 2026.

    Sales Surge training the Vita Brevis Fine Art team on location in Colorado Springs
    Training on location in Colorado Springs: day 1 of 3, with the whole team in the room before the cutover.

    What was the challenge?

    1

    One shared account, more than 70 pipelines

    A team of about 25 people worked in one shared Pipedrive login, spread over more than 70 pipelines split by source, brand and session type. Nothing could be traced to a person.

    2

    No dashboards, six spreadsheets

    There were 0 dashboards in Pipedrive. Reporting ran through six Google Sheets, and revenue was not tracked in the CRM at all.

    3

    Paper in the studio

    Clients checked in on paper and signed a policy document that was emailed beforehand. Afterwards it was all typed into the CRM by hand.

    4

    Calling without a system

    Bookers picked their own leads, made 8 calls per hour against a benchmark of 20, and 15 to 20 percent of the records were duplicates. The 129 automations behind it were undocumented.

    In short: the studio sold well, but booking, studio, calling and reporting each lived somewhere else.

    How did Pipedrive become the cockpit?

    A standard CRM covers the pipeline. This studio needed more: booking with a fee, the studio day itself, calling at volume and reporting over all of it. So we built those parts into Pipedrive, and made the deal the place where everything starts and lands. That is what makes Pipedrive the cockpit here.

    Scheduler: booking app inside the deal

    • A Book Session panel on every deal: the booker books and takes the $250 reservation fee in the same call, without leaving Pipedrive
    • Date, time, studio, fee and payment status land on the deal and in the calendar automatically
    • A slot is held for 10 minutes during a card payment and for 48 hours when the client gets a payment link
    • Three schedules with staggered start times, so sessions never collide

    Studio app for the studio day

    • Check-in on an iPad in kiosk mode: the client checks their details, adds family members and signs the studio policy in about 2 minutes
    • After check-in the deal moves to the next stage by itself
    • The ProSelect order file goes into the app: products land on the deal, the order value is set and the designer is credited
    • A printed day sheet for the studio, without system notes

    JustCall with campaign dialing

    • Sales Dialer campaigns fill themselves from Pipedrive filters 4 times a day: new people in, people who no longer belong out
    • At the start that was 8 campaigns with 2,631 people
    • Call notes, outcome and the JustCall AI summary land in one pinned note on the deal
    • A STOP text closes the deal as lost; texts run from a registered 10DLC number

    Surge Reports over every source

    • Surge Reports in 7 tabs: Leads, Bookings, Communications, Sales, Commissions, Production and Management
    • Sources: Pipedrive, JustCall, the booking app, the Studio app (every 15 minutes), ad spend per ad code from Meta and TikTok, and the studio mailbox
    • Tile definitions set by the owner and the CIO, plus a read-only API for the owner's own tool

    A Pipedrive base that carries it

    • 3 pipelines with 14 stages instead of more than 70: Lead, Booking and Production
    • 21 individual users instead of one shared login
    • 126,197 deals migrated, and 0 duplicates after the first daily duplicate check

    Make as the engine underneath

    • Zapier replaced by Make, rebuilt rather than copied
    • 67 active Make scenarios on 12 October 2026
    • The automation is what the booker never sees: it keeps deal, apps, JustCall and reports in step

    How did the cutover go?

    1. April 2026Contract signed for a RevOps switchover of 22 weeks
    2. 9 and 10 September 2026Cutover to the new environment
    3. 26 September 2026Delivery, all bookers on JustCall, followed by hypercare with weekly sessions
    4. 7 October 2026Follow-up assignment signed for invoicing, Affirm and maintenance

    The results in numbers

    70+ → 3

    pipelines, from more than 70 to Lead, Booking and Production

    1 → 21

    from one shared login to 21 individual users

    126,197

    deals migrated into the new Pipedrive environment

    ~2 min

    for a check-in on the iPad, instead of paper

    4× a day

    calling campaigns refilled from Pipedrive filters

    7

    reporting tabs in Surge Reports, over every source

    You can not go wrong!
    "I believe most small businesses and some large ones get stuck at a level, and you do not know how to get to the next. We were there. … When he gave us the proposal, we were not just sold, but now we KNEW how to get to the next level! … You can not go wrong with Sales Surge and with Sander!"
    Keith Starns, CIO, Vita Brevis Fine Art
    Review on the Pipedrive Marketplace, 8 October 2026

    What should you know before a project like this?

    A switchover of this size does not end on go live day. After the cutover on 9 and 10 September we ran hypercare with weekly sessions, and those sessions continued after delivery on 26 September. The booking report reached 99 percent accuracy during that hypercare in October, not on day one. And the apps keep growing with the studio: invoicing in the Studio app is the next step, not something that was there at delivery. Plan for that period if you are considering a similar project.

    What do we do now?

    Weekly hypercare sessions with the studio, for questions and small adjustments now that everyone works in the new setup

    A follow-up assignment, signed on 7 October 2026, for invoicing, Affirm and maintenance

    Has your team outgrown a standard setup as well? Read how we approach Pipedrive for larger teams.

    Running into the same limits?