Pipedrive – The App for Kingpins

Pipedrive is a web-app that salespeople, agents, and dealmakers of all kinds can use to manage their sales stats, set targets or goals, and find opportunities for growth within their industries. By eliminating the barriers than slow down other CRM applications, Pipedrive’s creators have developed a sleek web-app that cuts right to the chase.

If you work in an industry that relies on closing major deals to generate revenue, then you’ll want to check out the offerings on Pipedrive. Sign up for a free trial in 60 seconds, and you’ll be dropped off at your new dashboard page. Add all the deals you’re working on to this dashboard page, making sure to place each potential deal into one of five sales stages. Potential clients that you intend to contact should start out in the “Idea” stage, depending on the industry you’re in. The sales stages are fully customizable, as is most of the Pipedrive application, so you can name the sale stages whatever you wish. As deals progress and sales leads turn into new clients, you’ll want to drag and drop individual deals into new stages or categories. Schedule any activities or actions – like creating a presentation or booking a reservation – that need to be completed before a deal can close, and use the red light/green light feature to stay updated on when these scheduled activities need to be complete.

In addition to its speedy project management system, Pipedrive also includes features that let you set sales activity goals, measure your team’s progress, and sync your various calendars and email accounts. The application makes it easy for people who use Highrise or Excel spreadsheets to move their information over, and stores encrypted backups of each user’s data in the Amazon cloud.

Practical Uses:

• Improve your sales record by closing more deals
• Set goals for you team and track the groups’ progress
• Stay on top of clients whose deals are about to close
• Get reminded when an important estimate or proposal needs to be sent

Insider Tips:

• Users can customize the sales stages on their pipelines
• Deals can be sorted by employee or client
• All pricing plans let companies work on an unlimited number of deals
• Pipedrive automatically loads the next scheduled activity each time a user completes a task

What we liked:

• Users can drag and drop clients into new categories as their deals progress
• Red light/green light feature notifies users when they need to take action on a project
• Unreached goals automatically carry over to the next sales cycle
• Pipedrive backs up its users’ data on a daily basis

What we didn’t like:

• Nothing

Alternatives:

• 37signals – http://37signals.com
• Salesforce – http://www.salesforce.com
• Zoho – http://www.zoho.com

Company Info:

• Launched: January 2011 (Public beta)
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: Tallinn, Estonia, and San Francisco, California
• Founded by: Timo Rein, Urmas Purde, and Peep Vain
• Web site: https://www.pipedrive.com/en-US

Costs:

• Free 30-day trial
• Lite plan is $27/month
• Business plan is $54/month
• Business XL plan is $123/month