CRM software is all the rage right now, as many businesses look to optimize their sales pipeline and improve functionality. Pipedrive, a unicorn startup, with a value that soars above $1 billion, is a popular choice for businesses looking for an enterprise CRM that’s customizable and flexible.
Pipedrive was established in Estonia in 2010, and since then, its growth has been nothing short of meteoric. Pipedrive is now used by sales teams in more than 100,000 companies, and is available in more than 179 countries.
Pipedrive offers a bunch of integrations and automation features to optimize and streamline the sales process, making it a strong competitor in the CRM industry.
In this Pipedrive review, we’ll review this CRM system, its performance, and see if it’s the right choice for you!
Hopefully, by the end of this Pipedrive review, you’ll be better positioned to decide whether this platform’s made it onto your shortlist.
Let’s take a look:
What is Pipedrive CRM?
Pipedrive has been around since 2010 and has ten offices in eight countries: Estonia, the US, Portugal, the UK, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Latvia, and Germany. At the time of writing, it’s used by over 100,000 entrepreneurs located across 179 countries.
Pipedrive aims to offer its customers a sales-focused CRM, empowering users to visualize their sales processes from beginning to end. So, in a nutshell, Pipedrive is a cloud-based sales CRM and management solution that provides the tools you need to:
- Plan your sales campaigns
- Monitor the progress of sales deals
- Follow up leads
- Offer your customers live chat support
- Generate reports to track individual and team targets and assess sales data
…and much more!
Pipedrive is accessible via a web browser or iOS and Android mobile apps. It also lets you send custom marketing emails and connect with 250+ integrations with one-click installation.
Lastly, there’s also a range of price plans, so rest assured, Pipedrive can scale with you.
Pipedrive CRM – Features
Pipedrive markets itself as the first CRM created by sales professionals, offering a slew of benefits that sales professionals will definitely like. Let’s dive into its set of features.
Managing Deal Pipelines
Pipedrive was mainly created to help professionals manage deals properly. And, it does a fantastic job of helping salespeople do just that.
You can start off with a default deal pipeline, or you can create as many custom deal pipelines as you prefer. Each deal pipeline is shown as a Kanban board, letting you create new columns (or steps), and letting you drag and drop each deal as the sale passes through different stages.
This offers unparalleled transparency and lets managers easily see how deals are progressing. Pipedrive also includes a comprehensive calendar, and there are integrations for adding sync with Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.
Email Marketing Automation
One of the best features of this CRM solution is that it offers an excellent email marketing solution, so you don’t need to invest in any other solution like Mailchimp. Any sales professional worth their salt understands the importance of using email campaigns to promote their products.
From custom email templates to creating follow up emails, Campaigns by Pipedrive (that’s what they call their email marketing solution), is an excellent email marketing solution. It integrates seamlessly with Pipedrive’s solution, and offers basic drag-and-drop elements for creating templates.
Building Emails
The email builder comes with an array of layouts that you can easily customize, and then just replace with your messaging. Campaigns also lets you easily import HTML templates that you’ve created before too.
It contains a simple drag-and-drop email editor, letting you select fonts, embed GIFs, adding pictures, UTM links, and any other elements that you want.
Segmenting Emails
Ideal for lead generation, segmenting emails lets you reach the right customers as they move through your marketing funnel. Campaigns lets you easily filter contacts and identify their preferences so that you can tailor your messaging accordingly.
There are a range of built-in filters, including:
- Subscription status
- Send date
- Date subscribed
- Reason for email bounce
Email Analytics
Email analytics simplify lead management, letting sales professionals know the impact of their campaigns. Campaigns offers a comprehensive array of reports and insights, allowing you to figure out key metrics like:
- Open rate
- Click rate
- Click-through rate
- Total clicks
- Unique clicks
- User flows
Mobile App
Like most other major CRM platforms such as Salesforce and HubSpot, Pipedrive has a relatively user-friendly mobile app that improves sales management while you’re on the go.It’s available for both the Android and iOS mobile platforms.
The app offers email sync, so you can check out campaigns and their performance, and also send emails to your company’s Gmail account. The app also gives you notifications once you provide the necessary permissions, so you can easily know when a deal is closed, or when you receive a notification.
The mobile app offers considerable functionality, so it’s not just one of those companion apps that you can use just for tracking. Instead, with this app, you can easily take notes, make calls, schedule activities, or even use it to plan your data.
There’s also a nifty feature that lets you see clients that are nearby using your location. So, if you want to drop by for a meeting or just follow up, the app can notify you right away. It may seem a bit intrusive, but it’s an option.
Workflow Automation
The best CRM solutions all have one thing in common: they really prioritize workflow automation. Like Zoho CRM and others, Pipedrive offers a simple, drag-and-drop interface, custom fields, and a very intuitive design.
And, it really prioritizes automation, letting sales staff automate a bunch of different administrative tasks. Pipedrive lets you nurture leads while you focus more towards pipeline management.
You can define desired actions and associated triggers, significantly improving customer relationship management. More importantly, you’ll receive automatic notifications whenever a change is made to the account settings.
Common tasks that you can automate include:
- Creating a deal whenever you add new contacts
- Transferring ownership between different sales reps
- Creating new activities as a deal passes through the pipeline
- Send personalized emails whenever a deal reaches a specific stage
You can even use Zapier and connect to a host of other apps, allowing you to improve the functionality of this CRM tool. Using the API, you can easily set up triggers and customize workflows across apps.
Smart Contact Data Management
Experienced sales professionals know just how important it is to have the right data about their prospects as they start selling. Key bits of information, such as their place of work or their personal preferences can go a long way in helping you close deals.
Pipedrive has a pretty fantastic contact data management solution. All you have to do is to add a prospect’s email address, and it’ll automatically pull data from the web from different sources like Twitter, Google, and even LinkedIn.
This is great, and lets sales professionals build a clearer, more effective profile that’s visible to all team members. You can use this information to easily automate personalized templates, allowing you to give each mail a personal touch and increasing your conversion rate.
Detailed Reporting and Insights
Any good project management solution must have an option to generate detailed reports and insights which can be used by the support team to review their performance and understand their work.
Instead of relying on spreadsheets, Pipedrive lets you generate visual reports, creating engaging dashboards that let you optimize your sales process.
You can easily include custom fields in your reports to track virtually any variable that you can think of. And, you can also create custom dashboards to evaluate performance. All metrics update in real-time, so you can track goals, total performance, and even share these reports easily.
Pipedrive lets you easily track email performance too, getting notifications whenever an email is opened or whenever a recipient clicks on a link.
Another excellent addition in Pipedrive CRM is its ability to create forecasting reports. For growing businesses, being able to create reports for forecasting revenue is very important. This can help companies in planning for sales and marketing strategies.
You can get a bunch of different reports, ranging from team performance reports to deal velocity reports. All of these can give you a better understanding of how teams are performing. Plus, you can also create custom dashboards to get a live overview.
Chatbot Integration
Pipedrive further doubles down on its focus to target the sales audience by offering a chatbot that’s powered by artificial intelligence. It gives you a host of different features and options that you can use to customize your chatbot.
You can also select pages where the chatbot should appear, and customize its appearance as you want. The Chatbot is included within Leadbooster, one of several add-ons available with Pipedrive.
Once a prospect enters the sales funnel, you can then assign chat requests on your website to different sales reps. Since it includes dedicated lead qualification features, nurturing leads over time is incredibly simple.
Privacy and Security
An important factor to consider when selecting any CRM software for use in your company is to evaluate the security. When offering customer support, you want to ensure that the security of the system isn’t affected.
While Pipedrive CRM’s marketing tools are excellent, the company has also worked diligently to ensure that they improve the security of their system too. Pipedrive has a built-in security center that makes it easy for administrators to get an overview of system security.
This allows them to track any suspicious account activity, including receiving notifications about the location and the time. It also lets you define rules or alerts to automate security practices, like whitelisting IP addresses or creating rules for time-restricting access.
Other privacy and security features include:
- SSO and multi-factor authentication
- Variable user permissions
- Ability to categorize users into specific groups or subgroups
Since Pipedrive is a cloud-based tool, it’s hosted on AWS and Rackspace, both of which leverage the latest in terms of encryption, so you don’t have to worry about your sensitive data being breached.
User Interface
Pipedrive’s user interface is fairly simple. It’s a clean dashboard with intuitive buttons to let you access leads, review channels such as social media, and organize your contacts and teams.
There’s a Contact Timelines section that lets sales reps easily review who to contact next and when to initiate follow-ups. This is great, especially when you’re onboarding new sales reps and need to help them understand your sales funnel.
As mentioned, the Smart Contact Data feature automatically pulls up contact information so you have a better understanding of each customer or lead. It also automatically merges duplicate contacts, so there’s no need to prune your database.
You can set up advanced user permissions to easily divide your sales reps into different teams for your ease of use. There’s also a fairly comprehensive knowledge base which includes tons of demo videos.
However, the user interface is so simple and easy to navigate that you won’t have any difficulty.
Pricing
Pipedrive pricing is generally quite diverse, so companies of different sizes can easily start using it. The Essential plan starts from $9.90 per user, per month, if billed annually. If you bill annually, that price goes to $11.90.
The Advanced plan starts from $19.90 if you bill annually, giving you more features like email scheduling or group emailing and a caller too. More expensive plans are also available with prices going as high as $59.90 per user per month, when billed annually, for the Enterprise plan.
These remove limits on group emails and offer you advanced calling and scheduling features. There’s also a 14-day free trial, and it doesn’t even require you to provide any billing information to get started.
If you choose to opt out after the trial, Pipedrive will keep your data for a couple of months before it’s completely deleted.
Pipedrive’s Customer Support
As stated above, the type of support you receive depends on your pricing plan. For example, everyone can access 24/7 chat, but only Enterprise plan subscribers receive phone support. Pipedrive’s Help Center or Knowledge Base is where you head for information on getting started, account settings, organizing your data, billing, answers to FAQs, and so on. This area is also where you can contact the customer support team.
Customer support is available in English and Portuguese 24/7. In contrast, for German, French, and Spanish speakers, help is available Monday to Friday, 7 am-4.30 pm, 9 am-5.30 pm, and 10 am-10.30 pm, respectively.
Other forms of Pipedrive support include a blog with expert sales advice, step-by-step guides, and how-to articles. Or there’s the Pipedrive Academy, where more serious learning happens. Here you’ll find courses, webinars, and tutorials designed to help improve your sales and CRM skills.
There’s also the online Pipedrive Community, where you can engage with other Pipedrive users to troubleshoot and get advice.
Pipedrive Review: Pipedrive’s Pros and Cons
Pros
- There’s a free 14-day trial across all the plans, with no credit card required
- There are hundreds of integrations and apps, including 107 free ones
- Pipedrive comes with customizable email templates
- 24/7 live chat is available on all plans
- You can create customizable pipelines
- Android and iOS apps are available, so you can use Pipedrive while on the go.
Cons
- There’s no free plan
- If you factor in add-on costs and paid-for apps, Pipedrive could quickly become quite expensive
- Phone support is only available for Enterprise plan subscribers
- Some users on review sites complain that customer support isn’t as helpful as they’d like.
The Bottom Line
Pipedrive CRM has quite a lot going for it, and it’s generally a pretty excellent idea for growing businesses. If you need CRM software that’s reliable, scalable, and has options for lots of integrations, you can’t go wrong with Pipedrive CRM.
With its 14 day free trial that doesn’t even require a credit card and its litany of features, Pipedrive draws you in quite easily. And then, it’s got a whole bunch of different features that sales professionals will greatly appreciate and use regularly.
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