Pipedrive’s a fantastic sales tool with diverse features and flexibility. However, it can’t do everything. Read below for some of the ways I’ve built solutions for my clients that enhance Pipedrive’s feature-set, without requiring a hefty price-tag or learning a new tool.

Personalized sales email automation

Ai4 was using Pipedrive as their CRM for capturing both sponsors and speakers for their conference events. Once in the CRM, their sales team would reach out to those leads via email.

Although Pipedrive offers built-in email automation, it can’t send follow-up replies to those emails. This was an important distinction for the Ai4 team, and one I was able to solve using Zapier.

Using Zapier’s Gmail connection, I set up customizable emails that not only sent directly from the sales team, but which also had threaded replies (and thus felt more like a real person sending them).

Using Zapier’s filters, I also set up the series so that if a lead responded to the email, the email series would stop (ensuring that leads didn’t receive conflicting communication).

Lastly, the automation also enabled personalization, by including the name of the person that the lead connected with on LinkedIn (which was not always the same as the rep emailing them), again fostering a sense of this not being just a “typical” automated email.

By connecting Pipedrive to Zapier, we were able to go beyond Pipedrive’s features and deliver more personalized lead communication, without paying $50/mo/user for an email outreach tool.

Connecting data across marketing, sales, and customer success

Dan Martell was using Pipedrive to manage leads for their SaaS coaching membership. But they also used Keap/Infusionsoft for marketing, and Airtable for tracking members and customer success. With all this data in separate places, it was hard to connect the dots from marketing to customer success.

Using Zapier, I connected the links in the chain, sending marketing data into Pipedrive, and then piping that data across to Airtable when a lead became a member.

This enabled the marketing and customer success teams to gather valuable analytics on which members came from which marketing initiatives. For example, by comparing LTV and member fit to marketing source, the team was able to pump more focus into marketing and sales efforts that led to the most profitable members.

Using this system, Dan Martell was able to connect their data across marketing, sales, and customer success, without paying for (and needing to implement) extra data analytics tools.

See your data, your way

Ai4 runs conferences and events on Artificial Intelligence. As a three-sided market, they need to attract attendees, speakers and sponsors - and with frequent large events to pull for, there’s a lot to track.

The acquisition team at Ai4 uses Pipedrive to manage their leads, but they found that its built-in reporting tools weren’t giving them what they needed. They wanted to:

• track acquisition data cumulatively

• see multiple metrics on each graph

• compare progress against targets

Despite Pipedrive’s limitations, it has a big workaround going for it - an open API, which made pulling data out of it relatively easy. Using a data integration tool, I synchronized all of the Pipedrive data into a Google Sheet spreadsheet (which automatically updated to stay in sync with Pipedrive every hour of every day).

Next, I used Google Data Studio - a powerful free tool for Google users - to analyze the wealth of data in Google Sheets. This highly customizable platform enabled us to create detailed, live graphs and reports that succinctly summarized the data in a format that mattered to the team.