The Best Sales Stack for Pipedrive under $100

Despite many legacy incumbents, Pipedrive has grown rapidly to become one of the top CRM (customer relationship marketing) platforms in the market. Rated 4.3 stars on G2 Crowd and 8.3/10 on TrustRadius, users enjoy the intuitive layout, rich feature base and economical price point. After designing sales systems at many firms, I have been pleasantly surprised by the depth of the Pipedrive offering supported by a robust partner ecosystem, which is challenging legacy alternatives which have an extremely laborious, multi-touch sales workflow.

As a sales leader, I have found that it is extremely important to create an environment in which sales representatives can perform as many of their critical actions without leaving the CRM. As sales cycles become more complex and team numbers increase, the proliferation of tools can lead to losses in productivity where reps spend up to 50% of their time on non-selling activities like updating notes, sending proposals and scheduling meetings.

In designing your ideal sales setup, the infrastructure you put in place should enable your team to do the following from inside your Pipedrive ecosystem:

Lead Enrichment:

• Automatically add critical information about a prospect to the lead record - such as Linkedin URL, full name, company URL and phone number

Email Communications

• Prospect to new outbound opportunities, harnessing sequencing technology to automate follow-ups ahead of time
• Receive all email in a dedicated inbox, allowing reps to see historical interactions with all customers
• Schedule emails to be sent best at more strategic times, if not in the present. For instance, when there is a time difference or a key contact goes out of the office

Phone Calls

• Make outbound phone calls, ideally moving from call to call seamlessly, akin to a Power Dialer

Send Video Messages

• Allows salespeople to build their own personal connection with prospects by showcasing their humanity. In a world where authenticity is a differentiator in a growingly transactional business environment, this can function to measurably increase success rates.
• Can serve as a superior mechanism compared to email, voice, or chat for highlighting product capabilities accompanied by visual media

Surveys

• Send questions and capture essential information from prospects to craft effective first calls and to gather intelligence from decision-makers in other departments

Sales Documents and Proposals

• Send and manage trackable assets to clients, such as case studies, whitepapers and slide decks
• Quickly provide costing estimates and outline the business impacts of your solution

Contract Management

• Facilitate editing between multiple parties on critical deal terms
• Emulate terms from previous engagements to save time
• Orchestrate internal approvals for custom deal conditions

E-signature

• Capture legal consent from multiple stakeholders to create a legally binding agreement

My Recommended Sales Stack for Pipedrive

With the above in mind, I have tried to create the ideal list of sales tools that align with Pipedrive to provide many of the required demands of a modern sales term, for under $100. Although many of the sales process demands need multiple tools to be successfully achieved, I believe this outlay will give any sales leader the best “bang for their buck.”

Pipedrive Gold Plan - $24.20

The Pipedrive Gold Plan is Pipedrive’s middle tier plan - suiting the needs of most businesses looking to scale their sales processes with a modern and cost-effective solution.

Lead Enrichment

• Use Pipedrive’s Smart Contact Data feature to enrich details about prospects who inquire about your services using the company domain, first name, last name and IP address

Email Communications

• Pipedrive’s Sales Inbox tool provides two-way email sync with email templates, plus tracking on clicks and opens
• Workflow Automation tool can be used to automatically send emails to prospects who meet certain conditions allowing you to reduce your daily workload
• Scheduler tool can be used to align calendars to book meetings on the fly

AirCall - $30

Integrating with Pipedrive, Aircall is a widely adopted cloud telephony solutions provider. 

Phone Calls

• Easily make calls in one click from Pipedrive
• Handle incoming calls without CRM and receive critical information in pop-up form to provide helpful context to any conversation
• Record and listen to calls for team training
• For an extra $20 per month, use a power dialer to reach more decision makers automatically and access the call whispering feature to listen to calls live and provide feedback without the customer hearing

GetAccept - $40

Integrating with Pipedrive, GetAccept is a deal management platform for sales that enables reps to send experiences which move conversations from 1st meeting set to final contract signed.

Email Communications

• Send prospecting emails with video messages, additional content and tracking all in one experience
• Get notified when prospects are active on materials and reach out to them in real time via live chat

Send Video Messages

• Send video messages to new and existing contacts, accompanied by helpful content automatically based on deal stage
• Send video reminders from phone or web when responses are not received

Surveys

• Build forms to capture client input and then create a more customized sales process

Sales Documents and Proposals

• Create stunning proposals and track engagement across multiple recipients, revealing the name and email of all parties who forward or view the proposals
• Send slide decks, pre-meeting agendas, and post-meeting notes on demand from inside Pipedrive
• Upload and manage key sales and marketing collateral with editable templates
• Dynamically edit materials before sending, without leaving Pipedrive

Contract Management

• Send contracts for internal approval before they reach the customer
• Make updates based on feedback from the customer, in real time, without needing to resend materials
• Maintain a log of all edits, changes and chat communications

E-signature

• Receive legally binding e-signatures from multiple parties
• Send materials via email and SMS

Zapier - Free

Zapier is a must-have in the stack, allowing you to connect applications which are not typically integrated to facilitate task automation. Imagine being able to ‘trigger’ an action from one application you use based on what you are doing in another.

For sales, these are some great ideas you can execute using Zapier and Pipedrive

• When a deal does not proceed - automatically send a survey to the customer using GetAccept and Pipedrive based on the lost deal status
• When you want to review this week's “hottest deals” in a separate spreadsheet- connect Pipedrive to Google Sheets and add ‘time’ and ‘deal status’ as filters to create a list
• When a customer requests a new feature - add the request to a productivity tool like Trello, Wrike or Monday

Total Cost: $94.20

Conclusion

Pipedrive is a fantastic CRM alternative to many established competitors, and with the correct integration choices, this can actually become one of the most affordable and powerful sales stacks available in the market today. Remember to design your processes in a way that reduces, not increases, the manual workload so that the sales team can spend more time adding value in ways that machines cannot. The goal is to keep as many related activities within the CRM as possible.