Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a CRM for creating a sales funnel pipeline to manage and track prospects through the pipeline to closing the deal. I've used several CRM's and like them all there is a learning curve to getting it set up optimally for business. Once setup it works great. One of the best features of Pipedrive is the visual sales pipeline in which you can drag prospects through your customized sales funnel stages. It's possible to view the pipeline for individuals on my team and for specific timelines and products. By being able to check the timeline view it's possible to choose the deals and activities to spend time on. It's possible to arrange deals according to close date. The timeline view is customizable and robust enough for management to have as their main sales pipeline view. You can track team members sales results with metrics such as total number of pitches and calls made which is cool. The sales dashboard provides a visual overview of sales data in various categories. Set goals with results viewable in real time. See new deals, average age, open deals and conversion rates through stages at any point in the process all in one dashboard. Pipedrive allows a good level of customization with sales pipelines. Add unlimited stages and custom fields while disabling certain modules easily. You can also arrange to view deals by delivery date or implementation date. Pipedrive works on tablets. You can access notes and contacts easily and search by person or company to brief the deal history. Click to call contacts with a single click and add new leads relatively easily. Pipedrive provides daily backups in multiple locations in real time. They encrypt data and utilize a back-up for the back-up which is always good. Pipedrive seamlessly integrates with Google Drive and Google Apps. Saving to Google Contacts will sync to your Pipedrive account and vice versa. In addition, Google Calendar also works as a two way sync. I've personally used these features extensively and was always happy with them. Pipedrive makes it possible to sync email to your current sales pipeline linked to specific deals and people. Using the BCC smart email address provided with your account copies emails to the sales pipeline automatically. You can also forward emails to your pipeline. I've also used these features extensively and was very happy. Google Maps integration makes it very easy to plan travel to and from meetings or sales appointments. You can also filter prospects by country, state or province and city. That's if your not using Skype for meetings or electronic signature service to get contracts signed quicker. The Pipedrive open API you could pull lists to appear in other software, or create deals based on contact form information form our website which suits development based companies great. Pipedrive has added several languages and currencies since I was using it last. Including: Brazilian Portuguese, English, Estonian, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish with even more currencies available than this. I personally used the import and export features to import our entire sales pipeline from spreadsheets into Pipedrive successfully. It's a real time saver. All of our spreadsheets imported seamlessly and our conversion rates went up based on the ability to take action faster and apply our focus in the pipeline where it was needed most. While you can also export data whenever you need it. Pipedrive has added a number of CRM migration integrations available too. I like the visual sales funnel in Pipedrive a lot. There was a bit of a learning curve, but actually I believe it was more like a form of 'software blindness' as the curve was not steep but just required attention to note which page you're on, lest you get lost in the sales pipeline. I really like the ability to import our current contacts from spreadsheets. We used Yesware to track email opens and downloads which integrated seamlessly. And the sync with Google Drive and Google Calendar made this an extremely productive and efficient CRM for our company.

As I mentioned briefly, I don't know if it was the software so much as myself, but I recall upon learning Pipedrive that it took a couple days simply to note where I was in the sale pipeline, or more so how it all connected together. It was my first CRM at the time and I'm certain this had a lot to do with it. Once all contacts were imported and system were set up it was a dream for us to use.

Overall I would highly recommend Pipedrive for it's ease of use, it's seamless integration with so many powerful third party applications. It's visual pipeline provides a big picture view of the tasks at hand. The ability to track contact email opens and downloads, when they opened the email, how many times they opened there email via Yesware tracking integrated inside Pipedrive made for it to be very powerful and easily provided a good ROI based on the very reasonable price of $12 per month, per user. Up from $9 per month, per user when I was using it but still very reasonable for the simplicity and power of the overall system. I can vouch for the customer support quality as well.