Richard Hammond Contents
The CRM market is not exactly overflowing with options and Pipedrive CRM offers up a very robust, intuitive and cost-effective product to the CRM market.
Pipedrive has been around since 2010 and has reached ‘Unicorn Status’ as a startup valued at over $1.5 billion in 2020. Over 95,000 sales teams have used the platform and it was listed in the Forbes Cloud 100.
Of course, this shows that Pipedrive is doing something right, but how good is Pipedrive CRM and what does it offer?
To date, Pipedrive has fared really well in the CRM market and their latest AI and automation tools bring some further innovation and excitement to the table.
In this review, we’ll be taking a closer look at Pipedrive and its features and benefits.
As many will already know, CRM stands for customer relationship management. CRMs allow businesses to manage their customers, leads and sales funnel – this is their primary function.
Prospecting and tracking leads from inception through to closure and repeat business is one of the chief pain points for businesses in any sales-oriented industry. CRMs address this pain point, making it far easier to track customers, marketing and sales tasks.
CRMs like Pipedrive organize leads into a sales funnel that allows businesses to track customer relationships in logical fashion.
In principle, this is simple, but as many already know, once leads become disparately organised and poorly managed, keeping track is notoriously difficult.
That’s where a CRM comes in. Pipedrive, fundamentally, is a lead-focussed CRM for sales teams. It will certainly suit marketing teams and virtually any sales-focused small business, startup, SME or SMB.
Does it have the teeth for enterprise-level businesses? Possibly, but that’s probably not where Pipedrive excels. This is a focussed, streamlined and lean tool that is extremely intuitive, effective and efficient to use.
Pipedrive allows businesses to track the chronology and progression of their leads and deals.
When you start using the software, you’ll be taken through a 7-step onboarding process that prompts you to:
Of course, you can skip anything you’re unable to do immediately.
The main strength of Pipedrive is displaying your sales funnel with simplicity, depth, and customization. That means managing your leads, including auto-tagging them from your leads database or emails, and tracking them from initial contact through to conversion and then repeat business.
The software helps you organize hot deals and rotting deals, providing guidance on when to renew your efforts with an established lead whose interest is waning.
You can create customized funnel fields and tag leads to different sales reps or employees.
Pipedrive is collaborative software, so multiple users can track deals from the same view. There are also extensive options for setting employee permissions that restrict access to business-critical information, personal information, or classified leads.
Pipedrive, as the name suggests, has a pretty classic sales pipeline/funnel view that organizes lead relationships from start to finish. It’s easy to start adding leads and setting deadlines, adding details, assigning tasks to reps, etc. You simply drag and drop your leads from one part of the sales pipeline to another, somewhat like a Kanban board. You can create multiple pipelines, e.g. one for prospecting new leads and one for post-sales support.
Contact Timelines enable reps and employees to visualize when a lead has been contacted, allowing them to see when to contact them next with new deals or follow-ups. There’s a Mail tab that syncs up relevant emails to and from each lead.
Scheduling new activities is extremely simple. The linear, logical UI is a joy to use and doesn’t require in-depth training to learn. The accessibility of the software combined with its competitive pricing is a boon for smaller businesses.
Pipedrive doubles up as project management software. You can collaborate with your team, assigning and tracking deadlines, maintaining to-do lists, goals, and more. The calendar view makes deadline tracking simple. This is great to see – modern CRMs need productivity and team management tools like this integrated in the same app – they’re especially important for remote work.Another excellent feature for general sales management and organization is the Product Catalogue. This allows businesses to itemize their products into the software. A simple but useful feature.
You can integrate your business emails from Outlook or Gmail with Pipedrive, tagging clients for automatic import into the software. Emails sync up efficiently to the software, letting you monitor and analyze email conversations from within the pipeline view.
The Smart Contacts feature here is really impressive, allowing businesses to automatically crawl the web for publicly available information about their contacts. Smart Contacts searches Google, LinkedIn profiles, other web listings, and many public online databases and sources. It’s an intelligent feature that can provide immediate intel on a lead.
Managing emails is very easy and there’s plenty of scope for email automation here too. There are tons of email templates included in the software – these make it simple to keep in regular contact with leads, past and present, whilst also helping businesses visualize when they haven’t heard back from a lead and/or are sending too many unanswered emails, etc.
Statistics and reporting were some of Pipedrive’s weaker points, but this has improved. All the basics are covered, like forecasting, tracking, and comparing past and present sales data to gain a detailed picture of sales performance throughout time.
There are 4 main reporting features:
‘Deals’ helps you monitor customer churn, helping businesses analyze their customer lifecycle. Revenue is self-explanatory, allowing decent but basic tracking of deals revenue over time. ‘Activities’ is for reporting, analyzing, and tracking everything else, like emails, demos, calls, or events.
It’s possible to pull up a plethora of lead and deal stats, breaking down the value of deals with other key information. This data can be analyzed using AI-powered intelligence tools, namely the AI Sales Assistant which can reveal actionable sales insights.
For example, a business may be putting too much time into lower-value deals whilst the higher-value deals go largely unmonitored. The same could be true in reverse – focussing too much effort on a handful of higher-value clients may mask the value of other potential prospects. The AI Sales Assistant is designed to uncover these situations and provide alerts on how to address them.
Formerly, Pipedrive was criticized for not providing enough features to actually prospect and create leads in the first place. This has changed in recent years via the integration of the Leadbooster.
The Leadbooster has 4 primary features:
Prospector: This helps businesses find outbound leads from Pipedrive’s own database of some 400 million profiles and 10 million companies. It works on a credit system – more on that shortly. Basically, you can use this tool to reveal leads with verified emails, phone numbers, and even social profiles. This is an impressive tool and the B2B database provided is quite phenomenal, but it will cost you. Firstly, you’ll need the Prospector add-on, and then you’ll need the credits themselves that cost around $1 each depending on how many you buy each month.
Chatbot: Pipedrive provides a chatbot that engages with website visitors, saving them as leads. It’s an AI-powered chatbot that also prompts businesses when human contact is required. This obviously yields its own value for dealing with customer service queries. The chatbot is easy to add to sites and features plenty of customization options for automating different response trees and playbooks.
Live Chat: Similarly to above, the live chat function can be operated by human customer service agents from a computer or mobile.
Web Forms: Inbound leads can use web forms to share their contact details and their information is instantly uploaded into the funnel. The forms are easy to customize for most CMSs like WordPress, Wix, etc. Web forms can also be analyzed for their click-through rates and other important metrics.
Due to the acute relevance of private and public data to CRMs, security is paramount. Recent regulation and legislation such as GDPR makes compliance even more important.
The Security Centre is fortunately fully equipped to deal with the rigors of modern data privacy and internal and external data governance. Due to the sensitivity of data stored within Pipedrive, they have appointed a Data Protection Officer and have worked hard to ensure GDPR compliance on their end.
They also provide two-factor authentication, account lockdown features (in case of a serious data breach), and numerous permissions settings, as mentioned. Data can be backed up daily and is encrypted on Pipedrive’s server.
Pipedrive provides native Android and iOS apps for tablets and smartphones. Syncing contacts with Outlook and Gmail is simple. There are some 275+ other third-party integrations with the likes of Xero, Trello, Zapier, Mailchimp, Asana, Slack, PandaDoc, and Pipechimp. This allows Pipedrive to be integrated into existing project management workflows as a more dedicated CRM tool. Integrations like Xero make accounting easy, allowing users to sync their deals and financials to the Xero accounting platform. There’s also an open API for advanced connectivity.
Pipedrive is a streamlined, focussed, and intuitive CRM for sales teams. It performs very well in its primary role – breaking down and organizing the state of leads throughout the sales funnel. Of course, this benefits both sales and marketing teams, due to the integration of email marketing tools.
In a nutshell, Pipedrive provides the following powerful features:
Pipedrive prices their software per user per month, which is standard for software of this type. Naturally, that means that more users and bigger teams = greater overall costs.
The Essential tier costs $15 per user per month, when billed each month, or $12.50 when billed annually. The key features you’d be missing out on here are the product catalog, email templates, and integrations with GSuite and other apps.
The Advanced tier then rises to $29 per user per month, discounted to $24.50 for annual billing. You’ll get most core features aside from advanced security features and some reporting features.
Then, there’s the Profesional tier weighing in at a pretty heavy $59 per user per month, or $49.90 when billed annually. It contains all features.
The Enterprise tier is $99 per user per month and requires a minimum of 10 users. It includes custom onboarding and priority support.
The Leadbooster add-on starts at $32.50 extra per company, which isn’t too bad at all.
There is another add-on, the Web Visitors add-on, that costs an extra $49 month-to-month per company. It’s essentially an integrated and augmented version of Google Analytics that syncs up to the software.
Overall, the pricing here is fair for smaller teams on lower tiers but things could get pricey quickly for larger teams that require some advanced features and addons.
Overall, Pipedrive probably sits in the middle range of CRMs as far as cost goes.
Pipedrive CRM is clearly well-made and optimized for modern digital sales and marketing teams. The developers have worked hard to add some excellent innovative features powered by AI and Big Data, namely the Leadbooster. The B2B database and Smart Contacts features are two stand-outs that ought to surprise some people.
The interface is superb – clear, concise but also customizable. It doesn’t saturate users with too many features, and it isn’t bloated, which counts for a lot when businesses need a simple but smart CRM solution that gets the job done with minimal onboarding, training, and ongoing maintenance.
Overall, Pipedrive does a really good job of fusing simplicity with intelligence. Reporting and forecasting tools as well as tons of integrations top things off, and the security center is easily sufficient for startups, SMBs, and SMEs to handle and govern their data, privacy, and security.
Is it cut out for large-scale enterprises?
Well, considering how large businesses structure their sales teams, Pipedrive would certainly be a good fit for some enterprise sales teams. Whether it could handle colossal volumes of data is maybe a different matter, but we’ve seen no proof to refute its ability to do so.
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