Pipedrive Review — CRM built for salespeople by salespeople

Working with Pipedrive already for more than 3 years has been a great experience. Having a chance to implement and integrate Pipedrive CRM for companies in Poland, US & EU has undoubtedly been one of my greatest professional adventures with so many business, communication, and technical challenges on road.

It’s safe to say that Pipedrive, when implemented correctly can actually change the way businesses work, mostly thanks to:

• Improving the efficiency of sales teams during the sales process
  (shared place for managing sales)
• Higher conversion and revenue thanks to a structured sales process (sales pipelines)
• Saving time on the manual job we do every day like email updates or entering records manually thanks to workflow automation

For some of the customers, implementing a CRM system can mean up to a +30% increase in revenues and even 1h of manual work time saved by every team member. But how exactly does Pipedrive work and what features does it offer? That’s what we look into in this review:

1. Deals — a place to handle all your leads and prospects

The main view of Pipedrive CRM is deals’ view which allows you to monitor all the open conversations with prospects and potential customers. In the deals’ view, you can see:

• The stages of the process and deals within each stage
• The value of deals in the pipeline based on your products sold and the probability
• Sales forecast for the next periods based on probability

All the stages in the deals’ view are fully customizable which means you can create your perfect sales process and share it with your team!

Also, you can create as many different sales pipelines as you want, dividing them:

• By source/acquisition channel
• Type of services
• Teams

Feel free to progress the deal to the next stages, enter any of your deals by clicking on them and display information stored in the contacts and organizations’ details or mark the deal as won/lost.

Once you have the deals in place, you’ll be able to filter them by different team members responsible but we’ll look into filtering in one of the next stages in this review as it’s one of the crucial features for any Pipedrive user.

2. Activities — one place to monitor and schedule your activities

Activities’ view, which can be called an “enhanced calendar” is a place to monitor all activities planned for your deals and organizations.

For any salesperson using Pipedrive, it should be the first screen opened when starting the day. Pipedrive activities offer 2 display modes:

• A list
• A calendar

Within each view, you’re free to enter specific activities, mark them as completed and schedule another one. You can also view the information you need to complete the activity like a phone number, email or physical address.
‍

Pipedrive will also allow you to propose the time to schedule your activity (like the meeting) through a slick Calendar. Feel free to adjust your availability and send the meeting proposal link to your customers which can be a nice alternative to using an external solution, like Calendly.

3. Contacts/organizations — browse through your contacts and businesses

Pipedrive is based on 3 main views: deals, contacts, and organizations. All of them are related to one another meaning that every organization can have multiple contacts and deals attached.

You will easily browse through your contacts’ and organizations’ within the dedicated organization and contact views. After entering the selected item, you will easily view more details of your contacts, including notes, planned activities, files. This view will also display the full history related to the account as well as the account’s custom fields. Custom fields for the organization and contact can be easily customized and you can easily design single-choice, multi-choice or numerical fields, depending on your needs.

Company and contact view will also allow you to send an email straight from your CRM or issue an invoice using a proper integration.

4. Products — manage your product offering to be attached to deals, organizations or contacts

With Pipedrive’s products’ view, you will be able to easily manage your product offering and use this data in planning your sales with the customers.

Easily add the products to your offer, adding pricing, variants or unique identification code. Add different variations of the product like type or color and see all open deals or files related to the product.

If you’re running an e-commerce store, e.g. based on Shopify, you can easily sync your store’s product offering with the Pipedrive database.

5. Filtering — the most important Pipedrive feature

Filtering is likely the most important feature in Pipedrive CRM you need to get familiar with to start using the software efficiently.

Use it by setting the and/or conditions and filter through your organizations by industry, deals by sources or contacts by the last time of activity.

The right use of filtering will let you create your perfect way of browsing through your data like generating your contact list (contacts that haven’t been contacted for more than a month).

6. Email integration — send emails from your CRM

Sending emails is an essential part of every salesperson’s job. With Pipedrive CRM, you will take your email communication to the next level.

Email view will simply show you your inbox with all the ongoing conversations. You can enter the conversation to see the associated deals, organizations and contacts. Every email you send will provide you with the enhanced emailing capabilities, including:

• Open monitoring
• Click monitoring
• Pre-defined email templates (including custom fields) for repetitive emails sent to your prospects

After you send an email, you can use your sales assistant to check on the recent opens and clicks, even after a few weeks. Use it to re-launch your sales process after some time.

7. Apps’ integration —enhance your CRM with external apps

If you’re already using other emailing and non-emailing apps like MailChimp or Asana, Pipedrive will be a perfect companion for you to make the most out of your workflow.

With hundreds of native integrations, Pipedrive offers a built-in app panel, allowing you to parse the data from the app in the contact and organization’s details, including data like newsletter opens, clicks or document views.

By using Zapier you will be able to integrate basically any application into the system, triggering actions driven in other systems by specific actions in Pipedrive and the other way around.

If that’s not enough, feel free to use a Pipedrive’s API to implement any other custom integration.

8. Workflow automation — automate your manual tasks

Each one of us has some kind of routine when running the sales process. We either send emails on some stage of customer communication, enter data into the system when somebody sends us an email or assign salespeople to deals based on specific conditions.

With Pipedrive’s workflow automation, you will easily automate between 30–60 minutes of the manual job you do every day. The visual editor will allow you to edit specific steps in the process under specific triggers, actions or conditions.

Use it to save time for you and the team and go home early or spend more time on creative parts of your job.

9. Security and access - manage the security of your team and allow for access to specific users’ groups

CRM is a place to store all your company’s data and information, including confidential ones. Security management is probably one of the most important elements of this kind of system.

Pipedrive puts a significant focus on data security with SOC 2 Certification. It also allows setting access to specific parts of the system to users and selected user groups.

It will notify you of any security breaches like unauthorized login attempts or data leakage to make sure you’re able to securely manage your organization from every part of the globe.

10. Goals and reports — set goals and analyze goals achievement for your sales teams
‍

Every sales team’s goal is to generate results and there is no better way of data analytics than a CRM system.

Pipedrive allows you to set daily, weekly, monthly goals for your salespeople and monitor their achievements. You can also set goals for your whole company or team to monitor the overall progress and achievements.

Its analytical dashboard will allow you to analyze each stage of your sales process, including deal progress, activities’ efficiency or lost reasons.

Use it to optimize your processes and grow your sales performance. For some companies, you can achieve up to +20% sales growth with proper analytics and optimization.

Setting up Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a user-friendly software dedicated to both smaller and large teams. It has some drawbacks like lack of quoting/proposal system which are fixed by Pipedrive’s product team month-to-month but overall, it’s likely one of the best and most perspective CRM solutions on the market at the moment.

Setting up its desktop and mobile apps are manageable internally but the proper setup, training, and integration require some technical knowledge and experience.

Some of the major challenges include data structuring/import, custom fields setup, integration with external systems or team training. All of these can be handled by using a Freelancer's support.