Pipedrive: Our review

As the name suggests, the heart of Pipedrive is in its visual pipeline built around “deals” that go from opportunity to success (or failure). In most cases, you can start with the standard sales pipeline offered by Pipedrive. If you want to create your own pipeline, you can easily do so in the settings.

Once you have added your new opportunity to Pipedrive, it will appear in the pipeline alongside your other deals.

The huge strength of Pipedrive is in the interface of this “sales funnel” screen. You can move opportunities to each stage of your sales funnel with a simple click and drag. No complicated settings, or endless drop-down lists: you have 5 or 6 possible statuses at most, and you always have a holistic view of your pipeline.

You (and your teams) can filter this view by team member to see only the opportunities that are relevant to them, and see at a glance which part of the sales funnel needs to be worked on first: for example, if there is a lack of lead volume at the beginning of the tunnel, you need to step up your prospecting efforts, and you can see this at a glance.

This may not seem like a big deal, but in our opinion it is really what allows Pipedrive to provide a very agile vision (and therefore sales strategy) for your sales processes.

Contact management on Pipedrive: our opinion

Pipedrive offers several features to help companies organise their contacts, teams and correspondence. The “Contact Timeline” screen helps salespeople determine who to contact next and when to follow up.

The “smart contact data” feature allows you to obtain public information directly from the companies you are prospecting. The tool can also identify and merge duplicate contacts automatically.

The “E-mail” tab centralizes all your inboxes, Pipedrive being fully synchronized with GoogleMicrosoft Office and iCloud.

All emails related to a specific deal or contact are viewable in Pipedrive contact entries. This means that you can send emails from Pipedrive which will also appear in your mailbox – similarly, anything you send from your mailbox will be saved on Pipedrive.

You can also connect emails with associated offers to quickly discern their monetary value, status in the sales funnel, and next scheduled activity.

Administration & Reporting on Pipedrive: much progress

The tool allows administrators to restrict what other users can see and edit. You can also divide your sales department into teams, track their successes and failures, and create custom team goals.

The “Dashboard” tab allows you to access your important information:

• Value of all your new opportunities
• sales funnel for each employee
• Opportunities gained and lost
• Initiated offers

You can filter this data by pipeline, project and time period. You can customise your columns by filter.

Pipedrive has greatly improved its reporting: you now have access to several tables that integrate won and lost transaction graphs, completed activity graphs and a more in-depth analysis of pipeline conversion.

On the Pipedrive dashboard you can see how many opportunities have been started, won and lost based on product, values, discounts and the most active sales team members.

There are also case-centric views that show who started a case, where it is in the pipeline, or the status of all cases that have started in a given time period.

Contact details and data models on Pipedrive

Here we show you what the Pipedrive interface looks like for prospect records and data models.

The opportunity sheet

The Pipedrive interface provides you with a specific inbox for your prospects or for offers you are not yet ready for.

You can then fill in all the details of your prospects: you indicate who the prospect is, then the company, the current stage of the pipeline and the expected closing date.

The contact sheet

Here you can enter the contact details of all your customers and then link them to their company, but also to any current offers with them.

The company file

Finally, you can fill in company files, where you can list all the contacts who work there, with notes on the company’s activities.

Custom fields

Depending on your business needs, you can create custom fields and then filter your data. These fields can apply to people, offers, organisations, etc.

Pipedrive customer reviews

Pipedrive has excellent customer reviews on all existing platforms: it is the highest rated on Capterra, and has a very good rating on G2Crowd. Those who adopt the tool are clearly quickly convinced, particularly because of its very intuitive interface. The only weak point of the software for users who compare it to Salesforce is the reporting, which is admittedly much lighter.

Pipedrive mobile applications: a strong point

This is one of Pipedrive’s greatest strengths: you can access your deals on the go with Pipedrive’s apps for Android and iPhone. Like the web version, the mobile apps are simple and easy to use. On Android, the software even integrates with Google Assistant for voice commands.

You can quickly see your offers, activities and contacts; you are able to record calls, take notes, link both to offers and schedule follow-up activities.

In terms of reporting, the live dashboard gives you an overview of the status of bids by date, person, activities, wins and losses. Under the Progress tab, you will find reports covering a specific user or the whole company. Like the rest of the Pipedrive interface, the reports are visually appealing and easy to understand.

To take it a step further, the application also allows you to scan notes, but also to locate your contacts to schedule appointments when you are nearby.

Integrate Pipedrive with your existing tools

Pipedrive natively integrates most newsletter and lead generation tools, with Zapier & Integromat. The simplicity of organisation, information and implementation is also reflected in their open API which is extremely easy to use.

However, the tool lacks a bit of integration with third-party tools: even though most leaders are covered, you’ll probably resort to Zapier or Integromat pretty quickly.

Integrate Pipedrive with cold mailing tools

Pipedrive integrates with your cold mailing tools allowing you to :

• Launch prospecting campaigns when contacts added to Pipedrive are moved to a particular status, or when information is filled in, etc.
• Create or move a lead into Pipedrive when a (positive) response is received from a prospecting campaign.
• You can also tag the different contacts per campaign to get a final report on the prospecting campaigns (and not only on the leads generated)

Integrate Pipedrive with your customer support or live chat tools

By integrating Pipedrive with your customer support tools or live chat software, you can :

• Create leads in Pipedrive as soon as the lead is captured in chat, instantly.
• Give customer support teams the business context in all conversations to help them prioritise, and respond better.
• Provide sales teams with information about a conversation with customer support.

Integrate Pipedrive with CPQ tools (Configure, Price, Quote)

The CPQ process is everything from the formulation of the commercial proposal to the issue of the estimate and then the invoice.

For example, you can integrate Pipedrive with Quickbooks, the leading invoicing software for the SME market in France.

More generally, these integrations with CPQ tools allow you to :

• Generate customers and invoices automatically from Pipedrive in a few clicks
• Empower your sales teams by giving them payment information on invoices in Pipedrive
• Increase your conversion rates and accelerate your sales with the payment link integrated in your invoices

APIs, NoCode Platforms, and Webhooks – one of the reasons for Pipedrive’s success

This is a real strength of Pipedrive:

• Integromat and Zapier integrations are native, and really offer a lot of possibilities.
• The API is very complete and flexible with a node.js client and a php client – and a high quality documentation.
• Webhooks allow any of your tools to listen to everything that happens on Pipedrive.

With Pipedrive, you can create up to 40 webhooks per user. From this webhook, Pipedrive automatically sends a notification to the concerned tools about data changes as soon as they occur. You can find all the possibilities of webhooks with Pipedrive here.

Pipedrive pricing details

In terms of pricing, Pipedrive remains very affordable, especially for such a comprehensive and intuitive tool.

There are four pricing plans available from Pipedrive, so there is no stress or feeling of financial obligation when you start. Especially since Pipedrive offers a free trial period. Please note that the prices below are for an annual commitment.

Pipedrive tariffs: Basic plan

Ideal for startups and small businesses who want to organise and structure their sales with two or three people, as it starts at only 12.50€ per month, with a minimum of three users, and an annual commitment. The cheapest price for Pipedrive is therefore 37.50€ / month.

It is a smart starting point to develop a seamless sales process quickly and easily. This plan gives you access to all integrations and mobile applications. It allows you to create custom pipelines andlink your mailbox to the tool. In terms of reporting, you can create a dashboard to track your sales.

Pipedrive pricing: Advanced plan

It is aimed at growing commercial organisations and costs €24.90 per month.

The main interest is that this plan adds a lot of context to your CRM: it allows for example to enrich the existing data from social networks like Linkedin, or from your mailbox since it proposes an integration of the mailbox.

Pipedrive’s Professional plan: prices

The professional plan is designed for multi-level business organisations and incorporates much more sales functionality.

This includes advanced activity-based selling, click-to-call and call recording.

But it’s also ideal for getting a real view of your performance and sales targets: in addition to customisable dashboards, the plan offers extensive reporting on your company or team targets to better measure your performance.

Pipedrive’s Enterprise Plan: pricing

It is aimed at larger companies: it is the best Pipedrive plan, with additional integration and handover features.

The key word for this plan is flexibility: it offers extremely advanced customisation. As this is often driven by technical issues (security, etc.), the Enterprise plan offers enhanced security as well as different authorisations per user type.

Also noteworthy is the telephone support available.

Training costs on Pipedrive

The big advantage of Pipedrive is that there is little or no need for training as traditionally understood.

However, you can find training courses provided by a few CRM agencies of freelancers on Udemy and there are a few advanced training courses. Paul Minors offers advanced training & sales ops services for example. You could also look into the training programmes offered by Altois or Motii, both Pipedrive partners.

Integration costs on Pipedrive

Besides the fact that Pipedrive does not require any specific training, the tool provides a lot of best practices and content to get the most out of your CRM.

So the bulk of the integration cost is clearly in connecting the tool with your other tools, but the native Zapier & Integromat integrations make it very affordable.

If you still want to install Pipedrive in turnkey mode, it is possible with a specialized integrator. Pipedrive offers a selection of experts on their website.