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7 min read
The client needed a specialist to implement email and SMS marketing for their newly established online store. The client's main goal at the beginning of the collaboration was to acquire potential customers before the store's opening.
Monika Nastalska
Email Marketing Freelancer at SoftwareSupport
6 min read
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.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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).
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
8 min read
So how to set up a complete remote workplace in your company using cloud SaaS software?
According to Flexjobs already nearly 50% of the US population is operating in some degree of remote mode.
The recent coronavirus pandemic forces us to go remote whether we like it or not. But it’s safe to say that this historical event will only fuel remote work trends. The number of people working from home already grows by 8% every year.
This boosts the growth of freelance platforms becoming more significant suppliers of the workforce. But it’s not only about freelance platforms expected to grow. With the remote work trend, more and more of us are using cloud and integrated software to help us communicate, collaborate and deliver our work when working from home.
At SoftwareSupp, we’ve been working on the projects for fully remote companies, supporting them in building their remote work processes. We also work remotely every day, so we‘re happy to share with you an insightful guide on how to work remotely, helping you go through this difficult period without getting lonely or crazy.
So how to set up a complete remote workplace in your company using cloud SaaS software?
The first thing on your todo list is to start communicating with your team in one central place. There is no better way to do this than Slack, so let’s look at how to use Slack in the remote work times.
Make sure you use Slack’s private and public channels to bring team members to the projects you’re working on. Post to the channels often, so that the team knows what’s the current status of the projects (normally, you’d tell everyone in the office about some important milestone).
Integrate your Slack workspace with Google Drive to improve on the way you collaborate with your team. If you haven’t started to use Google Drive yet, it’s the best time to start using it. Integrate with Slack to get notified about changes/comments to the documents and to collaborate, faster.
Staying at home will feel lonely sooner or later. Do more regular wrap-up calls with your team to update you on your work and projects. This will maintain your team’s morale but more importantly will help you stay healthy.
Make use of Slack’s external invite system to collaborate with people from outside of your business, without them seeing all your internal Slack conversations. Collaborate within your shared channels, no need for physical meetings.
Using a built-in reminder feature will let you remind your team about events, like project meetings or due dates. Use it to stay up to date without having to manually update your team.
To reduce the number of emails and calls sent back and forth, set up a Calendly account to allow for booking meetings and automate sending meeting invites to participants.
Use Calendly to set up your work time and availability for scheduling meetings. Make sure you integrate Calendly with your Google Calendar to automatically exclude the time booked in your calendar for other events.
Integrate your Calendly account with video conferencing solutions to make sure each meeting has an automatically generated link (no need to manually send the link to the conference).
Integrate your Calendly account with #meetings channel on Slack to help you update your team on the meetings scheduled through your Calendly. Let others handle the meetings when you’re not available.
If, for managing the company’s contacts you have so far been using Excel spreadsheets, collaborating on spreadsheets when working remotely might turn out to be a difficult or impossible job.
Use a built-in import feature to upload all of your company’s data like contacts, companies or deal chances.
You likely don’t want to allow all of your company members to access all the data stored in your CRM system. Use Pipedrive’s permissions’ settings to set up access to specific information for selected Pipedrive users.
Use Pipedrive’s integration with Slack to update your team on the events inside your CRM (like completed activities or new leads added), without the need to manually send updates or your team having to access a CRM.
Using a standard banking environment is not the most convenient financial way of managing the company in the remote world days.
With the Revolut or Stripe in place, you will be able to easily issue virtual credit cards for your team and keep track of the payments and expenses in your business.
Allow selected company’s members the access to your Revolut or Stripe account to allow for financial management or analysis. Add users with different access types, e.g. to restrict sending outbound transfers only to selected groups of users.
Use Revolut’s virtual cards to allow your team to use the company’s resources when they actually need them. Set up limits for selected cards and avoid the need to manually pass your card to team members.
Integrate with Slack to automatically send updates about payments. Get updated about your expenses and revenues immediately. Make sure you keep your funds safe at the same giving flexibility to your team members.
Use project management software like Monday or Asana to collaborate on projects with your team and customers. Track the time spent on specific tasks with the built-in time tracking feature.
Create boards for your teams and projects to assign and handle tasks in real-time. Use project management boards to plan for your team’s and company’s activities/next steps.
Use sharing and link functions to share your boards with customers and other stakeholders in the projects. Allow external parties to collaborate and keep everybody updated about your project’s status.
Use Slack integration to automatically update your team about the most important progress on your project boards. Keep your company up to date without the need to manually check on the information by using one general channel or by using a dedicated channel for each project.
Make sure you improve on customer communication by using customer service software like LiveChat or ChatBot.
Set up a live chat or ticketing feature on your website to allow your team to handle incoming inquiries by chatting or handling incoming tickets.
Integrate customer service software with your CRM to identify leads and handle the sales process through your CRM, closing more sales.
Distribute incoming customer service queries to specific team members, depending on their location, division or specialization.
Use software like 1password to handle access to your technology by your team members. Reduce the time spent on manually requesting and sending access.
Implement the rule to provide passwords only through adding access to the 1password software. Keep your access data secure.
Create separate vaults for different access data stored in your company (like website, payments, marketing). Make sure specific team members have access to selected vaults and keep your passes secure.
Add your software as a Chrome or Safari extension and have your access data filled in automatically. Save time on manually asking for the access data or copying and pasting.
Start using freelance support platforms like SoftwareSupp to outsource the manual work you do every day and save time for most important business tasks.
There is a ton of work needed to set up your remote workplace when it comes to software implementation and automation (Zapier integrations, API connections, etc.). Use professional support from a Certified Experts and save time on integration tasks and maintenance you do every day.
Some of the development work you handle in-house can be outsourced to an external freelance expert. Working remotely is a good time to start using this kind of service to improve your workflow and save time spent on tedious dev work and resources on internal hires.
Generating content takes time. With so many freelance workforce available it becomes easier to outsource any content you want to deliver to your customers. Use freelance support to outsource content creation tasks and save time for content planning and strategy.
Becoming a remote company takes time and requires a designed process. In SoftwareSupp we help businesses become more remote by supporting them with proper tools’ implementation/integration, creating remote work processes/documentation and team/individual training. Turn your company into a remote workplace by yourself or hire our expert to help you in the process.
9 min read
We acted as the local partner and consultant to support the company in the CRM implementation.
Let’s look at a few words from Marcin Zieliński, the Head of Sales at Grupa Terytorium about the implementation/integration process:
SoftwareSupp: What are the monetary benefits you observe after the CRM system’s implementation?
Marcin: It’s a little bit too early to quote exact monetary benefits, I think these will be able to say after closing the 1Q of 2020. However, no doubt that this implementation and CRM system overall will bring us an increase in revenue.
SoftwareSupp: What are the time benefits you observe after the CRM system’s implementation?
Marcin: I haven’t calculated this in detail but it’s at least 2 hours we save every day thanks to sales process structured in Pipedrive. In the month time, it’s even 40 hours.
SoftwareSupp: What’s your opinion on our CRM system implementation? How does it differ to other implementations you’ve experienced so far?
Marcin: SoftwareSupp is a great example of solid and reliable partner. The implementation process for our organization was extremely quick and efficient. Your representatives were really engaged, professional and helpful. The implementation/integration process was followed with an outstanding support period which only confirmed that was our good choice when looking for a tech partner. I’ll be happy to recommend these services to other companies.
Effect: CRM successfully implemented and team trained on using the system
Problem:
Grupa Terytorium was looking for ways to manage its contacts and sales. One of the methods to do this was to use a CRM system. Grupa Terytorium didn’t have any idea which CRM system to choose and more importantly how to implement and integrate it across the organization.
Solution:
Using SoftwareSupp, Grupa Terytorium has found the right CRM solution based on the needed features and integrations. It was able to test Pipedrive CRM for an extended trial period. Finally, it was assigned a dedicated expert specialized in Pipedrive in the company’s location. He helped them implement the software, train the team on its use and configure the solution based on the company’s needs and requirements.
Result:
After 1 month, Grupa Terytorium is using CRM software every day, growing its sales and saving time spent on manual tasks thanks to proper software’s configuration and access to all the information in one place, including leads’ sources, companies’ data such as their revenues, activities, email opens, clicks or decision-makers. Grupa Terytorium was able to cut its costs of CRM implementation by even 10x thanks to CRM expert/freelancer, instead of using a large company’s service. Also, it was able to grow sales pipeline and revenues thanks to effective and quick CRM implementation.
Finding and implementing the new technology in your business once your team has grown to some extent can be a painful process. Browsing through multiple solutions available on the market, identifying needs within your organization to allow for proper technology configuration, finding the right person or company to support you in the implementation/integration process. All of these take time, effort, and human resources and can distract your organization from the main operational focus.
That’s something a local Polish company — Grupa Terytorium faced when looking for a CRM solution for their 10-people sales team. Grupa Terytorium is one of the leading local marketing equipment producers and distributor specializing in marketing materials produced for local and international companies.
They’re selling to some of the leading international businesses, including Tesco, Coca Cola, or LG Electronics. The company was looking for ways to grow sales to new regions and industries, so they decided to invest in the technology that would help them manage their sales pipeline and reach more customers.
Marcin, Head of Sales at the company was looking through different CRM solutions available on the market through Google and comparison websites, searching for the best fit based on Grupa Terytorium’s business needs: user-friendliness, easy integration with other solutions, user permissions and costs scaling with the growing team.
Even 63% of CRM initiatives fail.
Data, Strategy, Technology.
With 63% of CRM implementation failure rates, it’s crucial to find the right partner guiding the company through the effective implementation process.
He reached out to SoftwareSupp to help him in the process, so we assisted in finding the right CRM fit (Pipedrive). We acted as the local partner and consultant to support the company in the implementation/integration process to grow sales pipeline and automate manual work, including:
As always, the first step to an effective CRM use is filling it with the data. With Grupa Terytorium already having the customer information stored in the Excel files, what we needed to do was to process the stored information, structure it and prepare to be uploaded to the CRM system.
After providing the files through a secured online form, we could start working on the data structuring. As a result, we have successfully filled in the CRM system with the contacts, their names, email addresses, organizations they’re related to and many more.
Thanks to proper data structuring, Grupa Terytorium is now able to effectively filter through its prospects, depending on the industry or lead acquisition source (e.g. selected trade shows). They also have a products’ database inside their CRM system, letting them filter through the available products and connect them with the deals in their sales pipeline.
Consequently, the company can successfully create, manage and quote deals based on the value of products sold. This helps Grupa Terytorium calculate and forecast the value of their sales, helping the team close more sales by focusing on larger deals and saving time on manual sales calculation.
The next step was answering the question — why the company even needed a CRM system? Often one of the major answers is — to have the team follow a structured sales process.
That was also the case for Grupa Terytorium Without a CRM the company’s sales were pretty chaotic. Even though the company had some kind of sales process in place, this wasn’t something that could be scaled easily with new team members joining.
Hence, the next step in the CRM implementation was structuring the sales process. This involved setting up pipelines and deal stages to represent the current company’s sales planning.
CRM should work for your team, not your team work for the CRM. This may sound obvious but most often, it’s the other way around with the team finding taking notes of activities, contacts, and emails a painful process, rather than actual help.
With Pipedrive’s flexible approach, setting up and configuring a CRM system to precisely match your team members’ needs becomes easier than ever.
Some of the work we’ve done for the customer included setting up custom fields, configuring stages’ probabilities or filters. All of these, when connected with the company’s business knowledge means a huge time saving for the team and support in daily work.
Once you’re set up with the process and configuration, it’s time to start communicating with your prospects/customers. One of the most important steps to effective CRM use is integrating your CRM software with an email system. We supported the company in the proper integration of every team member’s mailbox, helping them make the most out of emailing the customers. After the implementation, the team can:
This helps the team become more effective, grow sales through proper lead identification (e.g. sending offers on clicks/opens) and save time on manual email sending.
Managing your schedule of sales calls and meetings is a crucial element of every sales person’s job. Naturally, all of us plan our activities using our own calendar. But once we have a CRM system in place, we want to keep both CRM and calendar in sync.
With CRM and calendar integration, the team can monitor their work schedule within a CRM. Also, all the company’s CRM activities are synced with the team’s Google Calendar.
This saves tons of time on manual calendar entries. Also, with the Pipedrive meeting scheduler, the team can propose the meetings’ time straight from a CRM system, without the need to manually set up a convenient time for the meeting.
Working within an organization is much easier, once the whole team has access to the system and knows what’s happening in an organization (transparency). But sometimes, we don’t want everybody to have access to all the information we store in our business.
That’s when permissions come in place, allowing us to set access to specific information for particular users or user groups. With the proper permissions’ set up, the company can manage access to specific deal groups (e.g. not disclosing customer names to all team members).
Some of the tasks we do in our daily work as well as in our CRM are repetitive and can be automated. But how to do it?
That’s where Pipedrive’s Workflow Automation comes in place, letting us set actions triggering another action in our CRM, like data entry or email outreach.
In Grupa Terytorium, the sales team operates divided into industries (different salespeople handling different industries). With the automation in place, the organizations and deals from specific industries are automatically assigned to the right salesperson.
The most common reason for CRM implementation failures is lack of team knowledge/training and the team not actually using a CRM in their daily work.
Training is likely the most important part of the proper software/CRM implementation process. With the team knowing how to handle the system, everything becomes much easier. The team knows uses the system in their daily work, which increases the number of data entries and provides the businesses with an opportunity for data analytics.
For Grupa Terytorium, we provided on-site training with the whole team, supported by individual support sessions to solve the most common issues during the post-implementation process.
Proper implementation and integration of the CRM system now mean additional revenue and time saving for the company. With the proper system in place, the team can now handle all the customer and lead conversations in one place, calculate the forecasted sales and plan sales activities for months, quarters or years.
Every CRM implementation ends with the support period and NPS measurement to ensure the company is actually using the system. Also, the system needs to be constantly reconfigured based on changing company’s needs and new team members joining.
For Grupa Terytorium, the implementation turned out to be successful with the reported NPS (Net Promoter Score — how likely will the company recommend the services to their friends) of 8.5.
6 min read
So what are the advantages of using email inside or connected with a CRM and how to set it up in your business?
Once you have a CRM in place, your communication with prospects and customers changes significantly. CRM not only becomes a central place to manage your company’s data but also a tool for customer communication.
However, despite having a CRM, I can see that many customers remain using Gmail, Apple Mail or Outlook as their main system for sending and receiving emails.
So what are the advantages of using email inside or connected with a CRM? How can it impact your business in terms of specific measures and numbers?
There are tons of advantages connected with using CRM-integrated mailing but let me list 3 major ones:
Remembering to CC your whole team every time you email a customer is difficult. Also, this doesn’t look well in the eyes of your prospect if you’d rather keep the conversation private. How many times did you have to keep scrolling through your emails to forward the right message to your colleague while being on holiday?
When using a CRM-integrated mailbox, your team members can access your communication history anytime, on any device. That saves tons of time on forwarding emails, updating your team members on key communication items and training new team members on the way you communicate with the prospect.
Example: With CRM-integrated mailing, your team can take over leads/communication when you’re on holiday or sick leave, without forwarding the emails back and forth.
Most of the emails we write are personal. After all, we don’t want to automate our communication with customers we know in person. However, some of our communication tends to be repetitive, like sending quotes, offers or follow-ups.
A CRM will help you set up email templates you can use in customer communication which will significantly speed up the way you work, saving your time on manually sending emails or copying and pasting templates from your docs. It will also let you share templates with your team for common use.
Example: Create email template for emails with quotes/estimations for customers to save time on manually writing key value points and copying/pasting templates from documents.
Once you send an email from your mailbox, you don’t really know what happens after you click send. You can only hope for the best with the prospect responding to your conversation.
Using a full-fledged CRM-integrated mailing system will let you monitor whether a lead opened or clicked on your campaign providing you with additional insight and a good moment to follow-up. A CRM will also monitor if your email is followed by a prospect visiting your website.
Example: Send email and monitor lead opening the conversation. Send a follow-up email or call the customer once they opened the email again.
So how to make mailing work correctly in Pipedrive? Below, I’m listing 10 tips to help you make the most out of Pipedrive’s mailbox.
This one is pretty obvious but I can’t tell how many times I’ve seen people using a CRM without an email account connected. Definitely, linking your email account is a good first step to making the most out of your CRM emailing feature.
Go to Settings -> Tools and apps -> Integrations -> Email sync
Having an email account linked to your CRM doesn’t mean you’re always going to use the email inside your CRM. You will likely keep using your own email service, using your CRM from time to time.
Still, you need to make sure the emails you send from your regular mailbox are synced with your CRM.
To make it work, add your Pipedrive account’s BCC address to all the sales emails you send from your mailbox.
Go to deal/contact/org -> scroll down -> copy “Universal BCC address”
You might be wondering — can I add Pipedrive’s BCC address automatically to all my emails? Yes, you can do it for Gmail, Apple Mail or Outlook (unfortunately not for iPhone), you can find the respective guides below:
Once you have your emails synced and ready, it’s time to speed up the way you send emails to your prospects/customers.
Instead of sending the same emails many times or copying and pasting your templates, you can use Pipedrive’s built-in template feature allowing you to create email templates (including the custom fields, like customer’s or website’s name).
When sending emails:
Go to Templates -> Manage templates -> Create new template
Use it to send repetitive emails (like follow-ups, proposals or quoting for customers faster).
If you want to send emails and use templates at scale, you should make use of group email feature, letting you send the same email to multiple recipients, at the same time addressing every email individually.
Go to Contacts -> Select the contacts you want to send emails to -> Click on “Send group email” -> Write an email or use a template
Important! At the moment you can send only up to 100 emails at once using the group emailing feature.
Want to send email automatically once you perform a specific action in your CRM?
Using workflow automation will let you send a personal email triggered by specific action inside your CRM, like:
Go to “Workflow automation” -> “Add custom workflow” -> Select the trigger -> Select “Email” as an action -> Choose custom email or a template
This can save you tons of time every day on manual email outreach to selected recipients and checking if you have actually sent the emails/follow-ups to the right people.
Knowing that your recipients actually open your emails is valuable information, isn’t it? Knowing somebody clicks on your link is even more important.
Mark email open or email click field when sending email in your CRM to make sure you track your email opens and clicks.
When sending an email -> Mark open and/or click tracking
Use the “Sales assistant” to check if somebody opens or clicks on the email after some period of time (e.g. a few months) and use this information to close deals coming back to your offer right when they need it.
Integrate with MailChimp using Zapier to automatically add contacts to marketing newsletter campaigns in MailChimp by marking/selecting a custom field.
This will save your time on manually exporting the lists of contacts to MailChimp or adding the recipients one-by-one.
Use MailChimp integration through Outfunnel to track the newsletter recipients’ activity including newsletter opens/clicks or unsubscribes.
Also, monitor leads visiting your website after they receive your newsletter to identify “hot leads”.
Use Outfunnel “lead scoring” feature to score leads based on their activity, email opens, clicks or website visits.
You can use Pipedrive’s built-in scheduling tool to propose times when you’re available for a meeting, either on-site or online.
When sending email -> Select “Propose availability” -> Share link to your availability
Alternatively, you can use an external service like Calendly and share the link to your Calendly availability.
If you’re running cold mailing outbound campaigns, you can use a cold mailing integration to create deals on clicks or on replies.
Use it to run the sales process to the prospects who interact with your campaigns.
You can find more information on how to integrate Pipedrive with Woodpecker cold mailing campaigns in my guide to cold mailing integration.
You will not see the effects of using email integration straight away. Start using it for a few weeks and months and see how it improves your workflow, saving more time for you and your team.
Analyze the impact on your sales and conversion and make sure you implement proper email integration company-wide.
4 min read
Cinch is the New York-based application featuring local businesses, including restaurants, cafes, barbershops, bars, bakeries or pubs.
Effect: 2x more businesses onboarded every month
Cinch is the New York-based application featuring local businesses, including restaurants, cafes, barbershops, bars, bakeries or pubs.
Cinch allows you to use a built-in wallet when purchasing items at local businesses at the same time offering in-app discounts for multiple products.
With Cinch, you will:
a) save time thanks to discounts
b) pay for everything with one wallet/app
c) easily search for local businesses/cafes/restaurants
The company has raised $2.4m of funding so far, investing heavily in building a desktop/mobile application and the product/sales team.
Running this kind of company comes with many operational challenges, including:
1) Onboarding new businesses
2) Handling customer support queries
3) Reaching out to potential customers/businesses
This type of operation requires a system to manage and handle all the customer and business queries in one place, commonly known as a CRM system.
Cinch decided to use Pipedrive as their main system. But without a proper CRM integration, the company’s data, communication, customer service, sales, and marketing processes were acting as an individual, separate divisions. Simply speaking, they were pure chaos.
So, the Cinch team reached out to us to support them in the database structuring, CRM integration, sales process design and team training to help them manage the company in one place to grow sales and save time spent on manual tasks.
Let’s look at how we helped Cinch set up a proper CRM system including:
Cinch had a really tough time managing their database. Basically their CRM was overloaded with custom fields that were not used by the team during the sales and marketing process.
One of the first tasks when working with customers is clearing and structuring the database which involves:
1) exporting the database from the current system
2) configuring a new CRM account to reflect on the target system’s structure
3) managing/optimizing records in Excel/database
4) uploading the database to the new system
5) testing and checking on the data structure by selectively looking at the new CRM’s records
After completing this process, Cinch was ready to work on the next steps including the sales process redesign or system’s integration with other solutions.
Another problem of Cinch was that their sales process was not designed and prepared based on their team’s needs and specific processes taking place in the company.
Before integrating the CRM system, the team did not handle leads coming from specific sources like website, mailing campaigns or calls through the structured and planned process.
As a result, the leads haven’t received proper support from the sales/onboarding team, they didn’t get actual information about the time needed to process their request and the sales team didn’t know which leads and customers to focus on.
Some of the strategies we’ve introduced at Cinch to make sure the team is able to handle sales more effectively include:
As a result, Cinch is able to organize the way they handle leads in a systematic way guiding them through the sales process, onboarding on the platform and passing to the customer success team.
Cinch was looking for ways to acquire leads for their business through the website. But having a website presenting a value proposition for potential partners/customers is not enough. You need to collect the information from your website to guide them through the sales process in your CRM system.
Consequently, one of the first integrations we introduced for Cinch was setting up a web form on their website, collecting information from their visitors and automatically adding this data to the CRM system.
This kind of integration can be set either by a built-in CRM form generating feature or using a 3rd party solution like Jotform or a landing page builder like Instapage.
As a result, Cinch is now using a form collecting all business partners’ information interested in joining the platform through its website. Additionally, all the companies filling in the form receive an automated response with details about the next steps in the sales process.
This is done through an integration with the Woodpecker email system, so let’s look into more details about how Cinch is using mailing integrated with a CRM to handle communicating with the customer in a structured way.
In today’s world, including Cinch business, we use multiple channels to communicate with potential prospects at once (this includes social media, email, calls). Still, email remains one of the most important ones.
Before integrating a CRM system, Cinch was running email campaigns rather independently, not looking for ways to make this process seamless and structured.
Thanks to proper CRM & email system integration, Cinch is able to monitor the outcomes of its campaigns in the CRM but most importantly, act on them faster.
A natural way to onboard new local businesses to the platform is by running outbound campaigns. With easy access to potential leads, e.g. by using already existing Yelp database, Cinch is able to target specific leads in New York and specific neighborhoods.
Cinch is running the outbound campaigns through Woodpecker, a software for mailing automation based on personalization.
With Woodpecker, Cinch is able to:
An important element of the mass email campaign is integration with a CRM system, allowing the team to monitor the campaigns’ results and outcomes within a CRM system and acting on leads, faster.
With the outbound campaigns active and a CRM integration in place, Cinch is able to monitor the leads clicking on the emails they received. With the best practice of calling the lead interested in the product within 1 hour from expressing interest, Cinch’s sales team can close the leads faster.
What is more, thanks to integration Cinch’s team gets instant notifications about the leads clicking on the email through a dedicated #CRM Slack channel.
As a result of the CRM-integrated outbound campaign, Cinch increased the number of onboarded businesses every month by +100%.
Apart from sending outbound campaigns and managing the leads incoming through a dedicated landing page, Cinch is also running a newsletter email campaign.
The email campaign is addressed to leads who are not interested in joining the community at the moment but are interested in the value proposition and might be interested to join in the future. Leads can be added to the newsletter campaign through a CRM system (by marking a field or after the deal is lost). Once they join a marketing funnel, they receive a bi-weekly newsletter with updates about changes to the product.
With the newsletters sent through Intercom, recipients clicking on the email are tagged which triggers deal creation in a CRM. As a result, a sales team can handle leads interested in joining the platform from the marketing campaigns.
With the integration in place, the Cinch team can identify and close a few additional leads every week.
One of the main communication channels for Cinch is calling. With the Pipedrive CRM offering a native mobile app and built-in integration with any phone number, the team can easily launch and monitor the calls.
But with Cinch’s extended needs for making phone calls, a built-in integration is not enough. For Cinch, we integrated a separate cloud-based Kixie application integrated with Pipedrive.
As a result, the sales team can use a local, automatically generated phone number based on the lead’s community/location. All the calling, SMS activity as well as voice recordings are recorded in one central CRM system.
One of the Cinch’s sales team goals after the user registers to the platform is scheduling a short training with the training/onboarding team to make sure the business knows how to use and make the most out of the application.
To make it work, Cinch needed a scheduling/calendar system to allow businesses:
With the CRM integration in place, Cinch is able to monitor the scheduled training in the CRM system, get real-time notifications about new training booked, and monitor the team’s training calendar.
As a result, the sales team can use a local, automatically generated phone number based on the lead’s community/location. All the calling, SMS activity as well as voice recordings are recorded in one central CRM system.
Some of the queries related to customer support can end up being actual sales leads. As a result, it’s essential for customer service and sales team to keep at least a basic level of communication, passing any potential customer/partner.
With the customer service/Intercom integration, the support can tag specific customer use cases who are then marked in the CRM system to be handled by the sales team.
Customer service users can also book training with the sales team through a native Intercom and Calendly integration.
With Cinch’s team working partially remotely, communication is an essential part of every day’s operations.
Cinch uses Slack as their main communication channel. With a CRM and Slack’s integration in place the team can stay up to date with the following events:
Thanks to communication and CRM integration, Cinch’s team can stay up to date with all crucial events taking place during the sales process.
With the integrated CRM system in place, Cinch is able to handle its sales process in a structured way, in one place.
Leads visiting the website can leave the information which lands straight in the company’s CRM system.
The company can be more effective in sales activities by identifying clicks and acting on warm and hot leads, faster.
The training team can schedule training with new business partners more effectively thanks to calendar system integration.
The sales team can manage phone calls in scale with a CRM-integrated cloud calling system.
The customer service team can pass leads to the sales team with one click.
The team can stay up to date with new CRM events and communicate faster through a CRM-integrated Slack channel.
However, without a proper team spirit and communication, pure technology will not be enough to turn this company into success. It is up to the way the team uses it every day which will decide whether Cinch will grow from the local New York app to a global platform for local payments.
10 min read
So why does it happen, and why an unintegrated CRM can mean chaos in your organization? Predict events, plan your goals and manage the work of the entire team using CRM integration.
Table of contents
Why integrate CRM?
Steps to proper CRM integration
1. Structuring the data
2. Connect leads’ sources
2.1. Identifying the website’s visitors
2.2. Connecting to outreach campaigns
2.3. Integrating customer service
3. Integrate with lead activity software
According to recent studies, already 91% of businesses over 11 employees already use a CRM system. Having a CRM is great, isn’t it? You’ve put so much effort into migrating all your data to one place, where you can now manage all the information about your customers, suppliers, partners, or even products.
CRM integration is supposed to make life easier and in a perfect world means order, access to information, better management and team planning. However, it’s not rare to see companies using CRM still encountering problems with having all the information structured in one place and communicating properly with the team.
So why does it happen and why an unintegrated CRM can mean chaos in your organization?
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
That’s how Bill Gates describes automation. Automation is great and means growth when applied to already working and organized processes. As a result, it’s often worth taking a step back and identifying bottlenecks within processes in your organization before putting the right technology in place.
How to identify if the problem lies within your organization rather then the technology itself? Some of the indicators can be:
The above can mean that it’s worth to look into your processes and team’s work first, before deciding to apply more advanced technological solutions.
If you’re ready to solve the underlying problems within the organization, you will quickly discover that the properly configured CRM can give a real boost to your team’s productivity and work satisfaction, improving on the overall communication and shortening the time spent on manual tasks.
Today’s CRM solutions make advanced technology and software easily accessible to each and every business, both to those starting their entrepreneurial journey as well as to medium companies, on their road to building international enterprises.
However, when starting with a CRM, it’s not difficult to fall into the trap of jumping straight to using it, without the proper setup, configuration, and integration. These can result in issues like:
Why does this matter? Well, after some time spent using not properly configured CRM, you will quickly discover that you consider using it as a requirement, rather than a help for your daily work.
Ultimately, a CRM integration should help you succeed in the work you’re doing and not distract you from daily activities, acting as a necessary evil.
Uploading your data into CRM is the first step to effective CRM integration. But uploading data is not only about uploading the raw excel file and making your data available in the system.
This will often lead to chaos and your data flowing in a CRM without any goal or structure.
E.g. Let’s say you do not organize the data and structure fields in a CRM before uploading it. You might soon discover other teammates adding custom fields to the CRM system to help them with their daily work, which will ultimately lead to information duplication or endless fields displaying under the company’s account.
A wrong organization and structure of data will also lead to issues in your data analytics. What does it mean? Imagine that after a few months using a CRM, you’d like to use all the gathered information to drive some conclusions and optimize the way you communicate with customers.
Having the data structured incorrectly will not allow you to drive proper, reliable conclusions.
So how to start working on a CRM in your company? You can do it by yourself or hire a consultant to help you. No matter which option you decide to go with, it’s important to follow the right integration and implementation process:
Before you start using or integrating a CRM, it’s worth to ask yourself a question:
Which information I gather about my customers, users or leads would help me make better business decisions?
These can be data like:
As soon as you know the data you’d like to measure within your organization, it will be pretty easy to structure your data correctly, so that you’re able to store all the information and drive proper conclusions in one place.
The structure could look like this:
Once you set up a solid data structure, you will find that anything you do in your CRM integration & automation is a lot easier. Also, anytime you encounter an obstacle in the later stage of the process, you should come back to the data structuring stage, filling in any gaps.
Once you have the data structuring in place, it’s now the time to start integrating your CRM into the software and technological environment of your business.
So before you start connecting your CRM, it’s worth to ask yourself a question:
How does my business acquire leads and customers?
There are endless sources to acquire new leads and potential customers and these can include:
All of these are only the examples of your customers’ sources and I’m pretty sure you can identify many more of them in your business pretty easily.
But once you understand the overall view of your customer acquisition channels you can make sure that leads appearing in your CRM are attributed to the right acquisition source.
Still, you don’t want to do it manually, do you?
Let’s look into some examples of turning this process into an automated workflow.
1. Identify your website’s visitors and upload them to a CRM for follow-up activities.
While Pipedrive, similarly to other CRM solutions will let you set up web forms collecting relevant data and putting them automatically as leads in your CRM, what about those who might be interested in your product but do not necessarily leave their contact details on your website?
Using technology like Leadfeeder or Leadworx lets you identify your website’s visitors and those who are actively browsing through your website.
By enriching this data, the software can automatically identify the companies and particular decision-makers within these businesses, letting you address your offer correctly.
What if you automatically identified the companies browsing through your website and automatically have the most interesting ones queued in your CRM for further contact? With today’s cloud technology this becomes possible.
2. Connect outreach software and identify interest within mailing campaigns.
By connecting your email outreach software to a CRM, you can easily send mass email campaigns to your target group and keep track of those engaging with them.
Let’s say, you have a group of 5,000 potential contacts who might be interested in your product, you’d now like to send a mailing campaign to this group of customers, introducing your business to them.
You can use software like Woodpecker and connect it with Pipedrive to keep the emails sending and follow up with the most relevant leads (those who opened, clicked or replied) directly in your CRM.
Similarly, you can connect your CRM to a mailing automation software like Autopilot or MailChimp, triggering a deal identification right in the moment when they become a qualified lead for your product (e.g. clicking on a link to the resource you sent their way).
TIP! Act on leads engaging in your campaigns, immediately, preferably right at the moment when they’ve done some kind of action. Set up notifications to tell you once a customer clicks on the resource in your email and call while they’re browsing through it explaining more details.
3. Connect your customer service as a potential lead source in your CRM Integration.
There are many leads browsing through your website who will ultimately only ask about the details of your offering. But what if during the conversation, you discover that a potential customer is genuinely interested in your product and might be a good fit for further follow-up activity by your sales team?
That’s where customer support integration comes in, letting you tag specific customer conversations as potential leads in your CRM.
How to do it? Use software like LiveChat or Intercom to automate the process of tagging customer conversations triggering deal creation in your CRM integration.
Alternatively, you can use a built-in Pipedrive Leadbooster bot solution pre-qualifying leads browsing through your website and creating CRM deals accordingly.
Once you have your Pipedrive set up with your data imported into the system (data import) and your lead sources connected (CRM integration done on the website, mailing campaigns, customer service process) you’d now like to monitor how the leads progress through your sales process and how they respond to your campaigns.
Apart from making sure you’re able to monitor the progress of your sales process through proper sales pipeline configuration, you should integrate your Pipedrive system with proper lead activity solutions:
If you integrate your Pipedrive with proposal software, like PandaDoc, you will then be able to know what happens once you send the proposal to the customer. This includes the number of times they open your proposal or the most often viewed parts of your offer. Also, you can set up an instant Slack notification every time a customer opens your proposal and have your team call your prospect exactly when they scroll through your offering.
As Pipedrive does not have a built-in lead scoring system at the moment, you’d need to integrate it with a proper lead scoring solution like Salespanel to score leads based on multiple data collected in your CRM. The lead scoring solution will collect overall information about your leads’ activity, presenting you with a unified score reflecting your chance to close the sale with the customer.
After you send a proposal, it’s very likely that your prospect will be visiting your website checking on your value proposition, reviews, and many others. It’s good to know when somebody decides to visit your website after your email. By integrating with tech solutions like Leadworx or Outfunnel, you will easily check on the website visits of your potential customer.
How to do it? Most of the lead activity solutions have a native connection with Pipedrive, allowing you to easily track the activity through built-in integration.
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