Anyone who works in a sales department or some other department that involves a lot of communication with leads, clients, partners etc. will tell you how important it is to use some type of CRM system that will allow you to keep track of the communication process. Recently we moved from Highrise to Pipedrive and here’s a quick overview of what we managed to improve on.
For several years we used Highrise for managing our contacts and better planning of the steps that lead to closing a deal, but also to have a closer relationship with our clients. However, our needs have changed and even though this decision was long in the making, a couple of months ago we finally started a serious search for new solution that would help us to get better focus on our sales pipeline and deals we make. We were also looking for better statistics insight and platform that will give us all necessary data in one place and yet help us to spend less time on managing contacts and focus on what really matters – people.
Customization and improvements
We found out about Pipedrive from our friend Ivan Brezak Brkan from Netocratic. It seemed as most suitable for our requirements and we decided to try it out. First step was to transfer our existing contacts from Highrise. However, we couldn’t do it automatically because Pipedrive and Highrise don’t share all the same default fields. I must tip my hat to Pipedrive team for great technical support during this transfer process who made it a lot easier and prepared everything for us.
When we moved to Pipedrive, it didn’t take us long to get used to to this new platform. The first thing we did was customizing it to our needs as this platform is really great in adapting and tailoring all of its functionalities to your desires. It provided us with everything we were looking for and even more with all of its additional features and integrations and add-ons.
Pipedrive helps me to track our communication with the client/lead, enables me to update all important personal and company information, to track and create activities related to each person (such as call, meeting, task, email etc.) which we use on a daily bases.
What’s important to mention is that in Pipedrive your main focus is on deals and tracking all activities in one place with easy drag and drop functionalities. You can see example on the picture below.
- Source: Pipedrive official web page
It also has great reminders which alert us to set a task for each person and even after finishing the task it automatically offers us to create a new one. And that’s quite useful because sometimes, when you’re crowded or in a hurry it can easily slip through your fingers and leave some people out of future communication. Our activities are now more organized, transparent and available online to me and all of our colleagues that are involved in this process.
Deals and pipelines
As you could see from the picture above, in Pipedrive, deals are moved through pipelines and phases (that you define on your own). For example, we have two pipelines, one is for our Leads and another for Referral partners, unlike before when the only thing that helped us to differ leads were labels. This way is much convenient, especially if you have a lot of different communication in lead management process.
All of our deals are now clearly presented in one place and we also have a better insight in our statistics and performances on a week and month basis. It helps us to track and increase our own productivity, but not just ours, but the entire company as well. Here’s an example of Pipedrive’s statistics.
Source: Pipedrive official web page
How do you see Pipedrive?
Even though we experienced from time to time some performance and speed issues with the service, and there is certainly space for some improvements around search engine (which should allow us to search by more criteria), we’re very happy with the service itself and their technical support that always responds in a timely manner.
Now that I’ve described Pipedrive from our point of view, I would like to hear how satisfied are you with this platform (if you’re using it) and what are other platforms you are/have been using for tracking and managing your sales processes?
I welcome all of your comments. 🙂
