Up Your Sales Game with Pipedrive

As a freelancer, I do a lot of wheelin’ and dealin’. At any given time I’m managing current projects, writing proposals, trying to close deals, and getting new clients. Depending on how busy I get, this can get very hard to keep up with. While traditional CRMs are great for keeping track of relationships with clients and contacts, sometimes you need a little bit more. Pipedrive aims to provide you with a way not just to manage clients, but a way to manage the overall sales process.

What is Pipedrive?

Pipedrive is sales management software that allows you to better visualize your sales process from start to close.

This is an interesting approach and one that really helps you get a good picture of the deals and goals you have in place. While Pipedrive touts a ton of features to help you realize these goals, we’re going to take a look at the key features: the pipeline, deals, activities, people/organizations, and products. Let’s do it!

Getting Started

Pipedrive makes it incredible easy to try before you buy. For one, they offer a 24 hour free, no sign-up trial. This gives you the opportunity to give Pipedrive a whirl without giving up any information, not even an email address.

The trial run is pre-populated with a bunch of information so you can get a feel for Pipedrive when you’re at full speed. This is cool, however it could be overwhelming to a first time user, and there is in instruction on how to use it; just click the link and go.

Luckily if you want to start from scratch, they also give you a 30 day free trial with whatever account you sign up for. Plus, they don’t take your credit card info until after the trial is over! You have several accounts to choose from, starting at 9 Euro ($12.86)/month.

Once you select your plan, the sign up process is incredibly easy. First you put in your login details, then your account info (avatar, location, currency, and timezone), then you set up your pipeline.

You can customize the order, labels, and number of sections in your pipeline. This is a really nice touch as it’s rare that 2 people have the same sales process.

Once you complete the set up process, it’s time to start using Pipedrive!

Creating Deals, People, and Organizations

The first thing you’ll want to do once you’ve got your pipeline set up is start adding to it. Luckily, Pipedrive makes this very easy. Just click on the green button towards the top of your pipeline. You’ll then be asked to add information on the deal, including how much the deal is worth. This is also how you can add organizations and people. As you type, Pipedrive will suggest each. If there is no match, the new entry is added.

Once a deal is added, it’s automatically sent to the first column of your pipeline, where you’ll be able to add activities to it, or move it along the pipeline by simply dragging and dropping it.

Activities

An activity is a task or to do item that’s assigned to a deal. This can be anything from follow up call to a deadline you have to meet. In Settings->Activities, you can make it so that you’re reminded about your activities, either as a group or individually, and when you want those reminders sent.

Organizations and People

Through deals is not the only way to add people and organizations. Each of these get their own area where you can view all, add more, and edit and delete. Let’s take a look at Organizations first.

From the Organizations screen, you can see a list of all the organizations you’ve added; they are also sorted by letter. Clicking on a name will bring you to a screen with just about everything related to the organization.

Here you’ll be able to see all of the updates in a Twitter-esq stream, as well as any deals, activities, people, and files related to that organization. This is a fantastically designed screen that really allows you to keep all of your notes and tasks in order. Clicking on the People tab there will bring up a list of all of the people you’ve worked with in that organization; clicking on one of the names will take you to that person’s page.

You can see a full list of people you’ve worked with, regardless of organization, under the main People tab.

From here, you’ll be able to add more contact information, as well as see deals, activities, and attachments associated with the person.

Each organization and person has a “dropbox” email address, which allows you to email info right to Pipedrive. Authorize email addresses to send from by going to Settings->Email drop-box.

Pipeline Products

One of the really nice features of Pipeline is the ability to add products to your account, which can then be associated with deals.

When you add a product (Products->Add new product), you give it a name, code, price, and cost to you. Once you add a product, you can add it to deals- including quantity and discounts, and Pipeline will calculate the worth of the deal for you.

Similar to the rest of the app, clicking on a product will take you to a page with the product’s information, as well as deals associated with it. Something I was expecting to find but did not was metrics on how well a particular product is doing; for example, number of products sold per day/week/month/overall, how much money you’ve made from a particular product, etc. That didn’t seem to be anywhere in the app.

Goals, Settings, and the Rest

Pipedrive has a pretty in-depth Settings panel where you’re able to manage your profile settings, activities, dropbox emails, your paid plan, add custom fields to deals, people, and organizations, enable various features like email notifications and Google Calendar Sync, add users, and much, much more.

It would definitely be worth your time to take an hour or so and really delve into these settings because it will pay huge dividends in the future. You can add extra info to your deals, such a price range or addition notes, as well as to people and organizations. You can also really up your integration game with email notifications and Google Calendar sync (assuming you use Google Calendar). There is also an area where you can set your goals.

There are 4 types of goals you can add: Amount, and Value of deals won, and Amount, and Value of deals advanced (that is, moved to a different stage in the pipeline). To add a goal, simply Go to Settings->Goals->Add New.

While I like the idea of goals, I wish we had a little more flexibility with them. I’d like to be a bit more specific about the goals I add (something like sell X Wedding Sites). I also noticed when adding a goal that Pipedrive does not handle commas in numbers properly, truncating anything after the comma. That means if you enter $12,000 in a goal, it will show as $12. Elsewhere in Pipedrive, the site will die when trying to use a comma, and you’ll need to refresh either that section or your browser. This is a pretty significant bug that made it through testing.

Conclusion

Pipedrive is unlike any sales app I’ve ever seen, and it has an interesting and very cool approach. It’s huge amount of customizable features makes it powerful and incredibly useful. However, there are a couple of features I thought I’d see just based on what was already there that I didn’t see. There is also the pretty big bug they have with comma handling. That being said, if you’re a small-medium sized business serious about your sales, Pipedrive is definitely worth a look.