Managing Sales Pipeline(s) with Pipedrive E-Book

Antonio Specchia

• Herausgeber: Strategic Links London Ltd.
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Digital Transformation is nothing less than the integration of digital technology into every area of a business. It may change how business’ operate, how they create value for customers and how they fulfil their own USP. It may also imply a change of management and culture. The transformation takes place by running experiments, facing failures and dealing with them by embracing Agile methodology. 

This book is for anyone interested in the Pipedrive CRM platform, but well beyond that, business people may also find it useful to verify if the CRM they are using is the best option or they may improve their business effectiveness by changing it. 

This book is designed to enable SME entrepreneurs in making better CRM decisions, first and foremost about strategy and logical approaches, then technology.

70+% of CRM implementation projects fail (HBR). Did you know that? 
To avoid falling into that statistic, entrepreneurs should forgo starting from the bottom by just choosing the tool they may like. This choice is not the first step, but instead the last one. Then implementing it will be simpler.

If you already chose the platform, maybe Pipedrive but didn’t have time or resources to run a proper business analysis beforehands, no worries, with this book you can take a step back and analyse your business requirements, from the light of the platform features.
Decide on and clarify the business requirements, the workflow to be managed, and the level of digitalisation of procedures having clear what Pipedrive can do.

This book will help you in setting the expectation over the improvement of the way to manage relationships with the most important asset: your clients!

Everyone interested in understanding CRM may find this book useful, seeing what Pipedrive, one of the fast growing CRM vendor, offers in its very popular tool. Then people may use the many “interactive challenges” as an excellent way to receive personal suggestions from the author.
Don’t forget to subscribe the information list on the book website: https://managingsalespipelinewithpipedrive.online/ 
We are going to publish reviews and updates you may find important to move a step forward.

Leseprobe

2 Setting Pipedrive, Using it, Learning It

Introduction

When you start using Pipedrive the account can be opened in seconds and you can start adding your contacts and managing your sales process with simplicity. Simplicity is great even if: “things should be made simple, then even more simple. But not too simple…”1.

It means that users can expect to find Pipedrive simple, but need to be aware that there is a complexity behind CRM. For this reason approaching it with the proper method and a clear roadmap is paramount to implement it successfully and reach your goals. Everyone may go beyond just a shallow use when they know what they want to achieve and what has to be done to achieve it. If solopreneurs tend to develop the tool directly, organisations can benefit from the support of CRM architects and solution providers: investing in professional advice will change the learning curve about the system, and can also smooth the organisational complexity. In business, velocity in reaching targets is paramount.

Simplicity can lead users to not fully appreciate more complex functions; then many users risk just sticking to its more shallow usage without even wondering if Pipedrive can create more value to them. When it happens, we notice users complaining about it, (but it happens to any CRM tool), then they start evaluating to move away in search of something better.

Frequently, people are unaware that it is not the tool itself that is problematic, but its implementation: the concept of simplicity was used in the design and implementation of the tool, which resulted in an ineffective setting.

Before deciding that a match is not in place, and that other CRM tools can be better, we strongly suggest a restart from the design: clarifying the purposes and defining the scope of the tool. In general, this is the main missing analysis that results in the perception of an inadequate tool.

It is good news that, if you decide to change, Pipedrive does not impose any barriers since exporting data is simple and effective. Something that is not always so straightforward with other digital CRMs.

In this chapter, we will go through some tricks of the account setting, users’ setting, and initial start of use. They are small parts of the process that can be unclear when dealing with settings. Users will learn how to set Pipedrive properly and speed up the process instead of getting stuck on unclear issues.

We will go through the following topics:

●Default settings at starting an account

●User’s settings

●Tables use and settings

●Task Manager

●Fields manager

By the end of this chapter we will be able to understand the foundation of Pipedrive, and how to start using it.

Default settings at starting an account

As you can appreciate, opening an account and setting the first user is extremely simple. Once subscribed to Pipedrive, an environment will be created in your company’s name: www.yourcompanyname.pipedrive.com. The initial set up is automated and an empty account is ready for your upload of contacts: People and companies (organisations). As a standard trial, you can use it for free with no card required for 14 days.

Essentially the Pipedrive environment has 7 operational areas, plus 2 add-on: Projects and Campaigns.They are all listed in the vertical black belt on the left of the screen. The main one is the pipeline, here is where it opens at start. We will see them one by one from Leads wich sit on the top of the list.

Users Settings

Once started, you will have to invite all your colleagues. Each user must be created by an administrator and given one permission set each. Then each colleague has to set up preferences and settings such as emails and calendar sync, and most of the time each adds an app link and setting.

After the user has joined that seat, you can upgrade that seat to admin, if you need it. Please keep in mind that in Pipedrive the licensing is per person/user. One account is the company account and to it belong a number of seats (users). Pipedrive charges per person/user, if you remove a colleague from the organisation’s account, you must delete the seat to stop being charged if you do not want to use it for a new colleague.

Note

Pipedrive is focused on a single user setting. Everything is based on the single user view. In every View, setting, filter, workflow automations, each user is independent.

Small companies, where each user has to set autonomously views and settings that fit the needs will find it easy. In the case of many users, this method may show limits: each seat will have to be set one by one for every user.

If you want to connect the account with a marketplace app, most of the time each user has to run the installation procedure of the integration within their seat.

This setting is how Pipedrive was born: “single user centric” at its very beginning. We expect Pipedrive will move beyond this logic as it is likely to become more interesting for medium-sized organisations. We expect they will create a Super-Admin account where Certified Solution Providers may be able to manage everything on behalf of their clients.

Users Permission

In the area of permission setting, Pipedrive has recently released a quite important update (autumn 2022).

This brand new functionality finally enables full control over each user permissions set and availability of features. We won’t discuss much about how to set up permissions as the video tutorial linked in the permission page is totally clear and fully explicating.

Here we only refer to the usability of permission setting to control what users may or may not do. For instance operators (Regular Users) shouldn’t be enabled in creating and deleting data fields or deleting entities like Leads, Deals, Contacts or Organisations. Managers may have some more control over settings. While Admin users should be very few people in the company.

The new setting enables the exclusion of users of any kind from the billing page that remain for Admins only.



Fig 2.11 Users Setting and Permissions control page. Each user may be authorised for each application

Be aware

Functions and features are enabled individually for each user, while the permissions in settings are grouped in Regular Users, Managers and Admins. The only great missing here is still a SuperAdmin role. The account is still user-single-setting: each user needs to set his own environment and settings. It is missing the possibility to centralise some settings of view. (Unfortunately when the privacy rule is misunderstood this are the effects.)



Fig. 2.12 The features of the enabling panel for each user

We are glad to confirm that, with this release, Pipedrive definitely reached a fully comprehensive control over users settings and features control.

Leads

This is a relatively new feature: it was developed less than two years ago as part of the Pipedrive continuous improvement programme that strives to move as fast as possible. This has been placed at the top of the black belt in the left side of your screen view because, ideally, it would be run before the sales process, but we actually left it at the very end of this dissertation just to simplify the analysis.

In the LEADS area you will find the table of contacts that are completely unknown to you, either because they are contacts entered from any contact point as they have been collected through a campaign or they arrived in lists of market operators. Pipedrive recently rolled into this feature some tools such as Live chat, Chatbot, Webforms, and Prospector which is one of their latest developments. Then you can find the ADD ONS of Web Visitors and now MESSAGING the now in beta-test feature that enables users in using Whatsapp and Messenger.

In this approach, leads management is separated from sales, allowing a dedicated team to qualify leads and move them into the sales process once they become MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads).

When a marketing activity is in place for a relatively high volume of leads, it can be helpful to have some people focusing on this stage: qualify the leads before investing salespeople time on them.

This may contribute to keeping salespeople focused on the sales process at all times. Dedicated resources who do not have a sales agenda and probably neither the sales commitment may focus on qualifying marketing leads even better.



Fig. 2.7 - The leads’ management section.

For micro businesses where leads generation is not performed as a structured activity, this area may result less critical. Leads are simply new contacts with whom someone in need to discuss their needs. When this case recurs, small business and solopreneursmay tend to use only the pipeline, by setting a stage New Leads or Leads In and move from there.

Deals

Pipedrive is very direct and operational, it starts from the pipeline overview instead of opening a dashboard. The logic is that the tool should be directly operative, that’s why it always starts from its most operative area: the visual pipeline. Here is where the sales process takes place, and where salespeople’s daily job is run. (Fig. 2.1)



Fig. 2.1 - The visual pipeline in a default account.

Once deals are in place, this view will be useful. However, at the very beginning it can be a bit confusing: “What should I do?” may be the question newbies ask. Let's skip this step and not add deals at this stage: adding deals also requires adding contacts and companies. Our suggestion is to logically start from that point to avoid cluttering of data. In addition, we will discuss how to upload data.