Blitzen is now listed as a Pipedrive integration. Learn More

What’s not to love about Pipedrive CRM System?

They have created a beautiful and light-weight easy CRM. Their pricing model is so simple a small child can wrap their head around it (and probably afford it). Their product, while perfectly suited to manage the SMB sales process, is flexible enough to accommodate a number of other tasks.

If that’s not enough, Urmas Purde, cofounder of Pipedrive, is a certified Firewalking instructor.

Say what?

Firewalking aside, let me show you some of what makes Pipedrive awesome.

1. A CRM with no learning curve

As a small company, you just need something that works right away. You don’t have time to poke around in new tools, watch a bunch of tutorials and sift through FAQ’s. Paying consultants to train your team is just expensive and a waste of time.

You just want to sign up and use your CRM within minutes.

Pipedrive makes it easy to get started with helpful (not annoying) in-product hints and resources. Within a few minutes, you can expect to have completed the primary tasks you’ll be doing on a daily basis. Tasks such as: creating your first deal, setting your first follow up activity, importing contacts, syncing your calendar and drive and so on.

If you want a quick peek at what this looks like, check out the 2 minute and 22 second video that takes you through their core features here.

2. Easily customize your Pipedrive sales pipeline

While Pipedrive starts you off you with a sales pipeline that makes sense for most organizations, it is not written in stone. In fact, changing the names, order, and number of  sales funnel stages to mimic your current process in a couple of minutes isn’t an issue – it’s just a few drag and drops away.

I wish I had more to say on this, but that’s really all there is to it.

3. Connect your Google Drive, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar

Email and calendars are core to a sales person’s workflow. Pipedrive allows you to integrate these services with a few clicks.

Google Drive

Anytime a file or email attachment enters Pipedrive, it can be automatically stored in your Google Drive. No need to conduct extensive Gmail searches in order to find that sales contract attachment. This feature alone should more than pay for the $12/month.

Google Contacts

Activating this connection lets you import any of your Google contacts in seconds. Those contacts will enter your Pipedrive along with information such as their name that you had filled out previously. Then, within Pipedrive, you can edit individual contact information, merge them with existing contacts, and attach contacts to new or existing organizations and deals.

Google Calendar

A sales CRM that doesn’t sync with your calendar isn’t even worth talking about. You can make Pipedrive populate your Google Calendar, and your Google Calendar events can populate your Pipedrive. You can even get more granular and select which kinds of Pipedrive activities you want to populate your calendar.

Want scheduled phone calls and lunch dates to go to your calendar but not follow up email reminders? Done.

4. Set sales goals and track progress

Sales people are a competitive bunch.

Dangle a carrot in front of a salesperson and they don’t just trot along hoping to one day catch it. No, they lunge at that carrot, rip it off the string, annihilate it, and then think about where they can get more carrots.

So, it’s pretty important that a sales CRM make it super easy to set personal and team goals, track progress towards goals, and make relevant comparisons between people, teams, and time periods.

Pipedrive has your back.

Personal metrics

This is your very own dynamic sales report card. There’s no need to run complicated reports either – it’s just always there. At a glance you can:

• See won deals, lost deals, and new deals started.
• See activities started and completed.
• Sort these metrics by predefined or custom time periods.
• We love this – you can also see how you’re trending for any of these metrics over time.

No longer will you be surprised when your boss runs reports and tells you that you’re not doing as well as you thought. You’ll be ahead of the game and able to make changes to your tactics long before that report is out.

Pipeline metrics

There’s some juicy metrics available for your pipeline.

You can see:

• Number of new deals in the pipeline
• Average age of deals
• Open deals
• What percentage of your deals are in each stage of your pipeline
• Number and percentage of deals won and lost
• If permissions are set appropriately, you can see how the pipelines of other sales teams are shaping up.

Between your personal and pipeline metrics, how you and your team are doing should always be obvious.

5. Deal rotting feature

Deal rotting makes deals that have been inactive for a certain length of time, specified by you of course, turn a hue of red. If you’re seeing a bunch of red in your pipeline, it immediately tells you that you have one or a combination of the following problems:

• Your lead quality is low, and too many of these leads aren’t worth your time.
• You have too many leads on your plate and it’s time to pass these leads along to a colleague (which is easy to do in Pipedrive).
• You are slacking and you need to either put the work in or optimize your processes.

Whatever your trouble is, too much red shows that something needs to change.

6. Blitzen integrates with Pipedrive

While this is still in development and a bit of a secret, Blitzen’s online formbuilder and workflow builder will integrate with Pipedrive’s API. Using Blitzen’s formbuilder, you will be able to have certain form fields create and populate new contacts, organizations, and deals in Pipedrive automatically upon submission.

We’ll be taking it to another level and making it easy to integrate Pipedrive with a bunch of other best-in-class web apps too. This will enable you to automate all kinds of other tasks without writing any code.

The best way to stay up to date on this stuff is to get into our private beta.

7. Data import makes switching to Pipedrive easy

Okay, you love Pipedrive now but there’s just one problem – you’re already using another CRM and switching is a pain. Not so! Pipedrive makes it really easy to migrate if your data is in any of the following places:

• Spreadsheet
• Salesforce
• Sugar CRM
• Highrise
• Zoho CRM
• Batchbook
• Capsule CRM
• Close.io
• Maximizer
• Netsuite CRM
• Nimble
• Nutshell
• PipelineDeals
• Redtail CRM
• Sage ACT!
• Saleslogix

They suggest that you reach out to one of their people and they will get you sorted as quickly as possible.

 To sum up Pipedrive

• $12/user/month
• You will be up and running in minutes, not days.
• It will sync up with your most important sales tools.
• Blitzen will make integration with sales lead forms and other web apps really easy.
• Urmas Purde walks on fire and teaches others to do the same.
• If Pipedrive is a better fit for your team, switching is simple!

What CRM do you currently use? How’s the experience been? Thoughts on Pipedrive?