Pipedrive Review: Is It Right for Your Business?

Pipedrive’s basic plan comes with tools for managing contacts, organizations, deals, visual pipelines, meetings, sales activities, and user access. It also allows you to customize fields and pipelines, import and export data, as well as merge duplicate entries. You can automatically link and forward emails associated with contacts and deals to Pipedrive. Aside from that, you can see your contacts’ location on Google Maps and attach files to emails and deals.

The Essential plan’s basic reporting features include insights on deals and activities, a shareable visual dashboard, and goal tracking for individuals and the company. This tier also provides an Application Programming Interface (API) access to develop custom features or modules not included in your CRM software. You can use APIs to pull financial data from an accounting app, store requests for proposals, and calculate sales commissions.

When you upgrade to Pipedrive’s Advanced plan, you get additional features, such as product catalogs, two-way email sync, customizable emails and templates, and email tracking. In addition, you can send trackable quotes, proposals, and contracts. This tier also unlocks workflow automation features, single sign-on (SSO) login, and recurring revenue reports.

Pipedrive’s Professional tier adds bulk emailing, e-signatures, in-app calling, and company-wide document sharing on top of the features included in the Advanced plan. It also has additional reporting capabilities like custom fields and reports, sales revenue forecasting, unlimited visual dashboards, and team goal management.

The two higher tiers of Pipedrive’s plans feature more advanced privacy and security features. You get a security dashboard where you can monitor your account’s user access and security-related activities. You can choose to add stricter login rules like time-based access restrictions and password expiration. You can also receive alerts about suspicious logins and data leaks, and see all of your team’s deals, contacts, and product inventory.

Pipedrive’s highest tier has the same inclusions as the Professional tier, plus custom onboarding and support access. It also offers 100 workflow automations, higher than the 60 automations offered in Professional. Furthermore, you can customize an unlimited number of permission sets for different user access levels.

With Pipedrive, you can view your contacts’ history of linked deals, communications, and activities. It notifies you when your customer opens your email or document so you can follow up with them at the right time. Furthermore, it allows you to share your availability for a meeting, see upcoming sales activities, and find nearby contacts using Google Maps.

Pipedrive’s calling feature enables you to make outbound calls directly from your CRM. It automatically logs your call as an activity under the relevant contact. You can also enable call recording and download the recorded file.

Here are some functionalities under Pipedrive’s activity tracking feature:

• View activity and communication history of contacts and organizations
• Email and sales document tracking
• Caller history
• Meeting scheduler
• Calendar view and activity management
• Contacts map

Users can track all previous activities associated with a lead or contact for a more personalized service. (Source: Pipedrive)

Pipedrive’s AI-powered sales assistant, called Smart AI, provides you with insights and advice to help streamline your sales process and win more deals. Through the tool, you can track email opens, keep tabs on community discussions, receive activity reminders, and get personalized productivity tips.

Pipedrive’s algorithms process large volumes of sales data, acting like machine learning applications. By analyzing these insights, its AI assistant helps you in every step of the sales cycle, from prioritizing leads more effectively to closing deals.

Here are some functionalities under Pipedrive’s AI-sales assistant feature:

• Performance analysis
• Sales forecasting
• Deal progress updates
• Notifications on insights and recommendations

Pipedrive’s sales assistant provides users with data-backed suggestions to move stages quickly and efficiently. (Source: Pipedrive)

Pipedrive’s Smart Docs feature allows you to send trackable quotes, contracts, and proposals within the CRM. It also notifies you when the document is opened. You can remove the Pipedrive branding from any of your documents, attach e-signatures, and allow everyone in your organization to access these files. You can also auto-fill the templates with Pipedrive data to lessen manual copy-pasting errors and send quotes faster.

Here are some functionalities under Pipedrive’s document management feature:

• Smart Docs (trackable quotes, contracts, and proposals)
• Auto-filled templates
• Google Drive and OneDrive integration
• Company-wide sharing of documents and templates
• Unbranded sending and signing
• E-signatures

Users can store customer files directly in their CRM account. (Source: Pipedrive)

Pipedrive helps you eliminate repetitive manual tasks and streamlines your team’s sales processes with automated workflows. These include sending personalized sales emails, creating a new deal when a contact is added, and transferring ownership of a task when a deal is moved to another stage. You can also choose to receive push notifications to remind you of an upcoming activity.

The Smart AI sales assistant automatically gives suggestions on what to do next and how to improve based on your past performance. Pipedrive also has a smart contact data feature that automatically displays valuable insights about leads from the web and social platforms.

Here are some functionalities under Pipedrive’s work automation feature:

• Workflow automation
• Smart contact data
• Activity reminders

Users can customize conditions in their workflows to automate processes. (Source: Pipedrive)

Pipedrive offers mobile apps for both Android and iOS devices. The app allows you to access and update records of your contacts, deals, and activities. You can also see your upcoming calls and meetings, search for information, and take notes. It also lets you make calls by tapping a contact, see the caller ID on incoming calls, and locate nearby contacts. In addition, you can add Google Drive files or create new ones directly within the CRM.

Here are some functionalities under Pipedrive’s mobile app:

• Android and iOS apps
• Caller ID linked to deals and activities
• Web-to-mobile calls
• Automatic call logging
• Client location on maps
• Contacts and calendar sync with Google and Microsoft
• Google Drive sync
• Chrome extension for Gmail

Users can access all the information about their leads through its mobile app. (Source: Pipedrive)

Pipedrive can be used by many businesses—from small businesses to enterprise teams. However, those who will benefit best are businesses that need robust sales automation tools, and those that use Slack and Outlook.

Users should consider a Pipedrive alternative if they want access to a robust in-app phone in their CRM, even on low-tiered plans. Freshsales is known to have a feature-rich, in-app phone, which is also accessible to the subscribers of its free plan.

In addition, users who want a provider that offers a free plan should also consider other providers, instead of Pipedrive. HubSpot CRM can be considered an alternative as it tops our list of the best free CRMs for small businesses.