COD: Estonian start-up Pipedrive is out to transform sales management

There are a ton of tools out there for sales management and CRM. The people at Pipedrive, an Estonian start-up founded by veteran sellers, think that the focus of tool many of these tools is on contact management rather than closing deals.

It's an intriguing statement, and it got me to thinking about the complaints I have heard about many sales management platforms. The big complaint that I recall hearing related to the amount of time that they had to spend inputting and updating information in these platforms, and how the analytics in the tools were sometimes misused by sales managers to drive more actions rather than focusing on sales.

Do I really need a second alternate phone number and email address for each of my prospects?

Hey look, I get it, everyone has complaints about their bosses. But let me give you an example. I know of an ad network that has a weekly sales meeting and runs down the number of cold calls people made that week. Now sure, they also focus on dollar sales, but a friend of mine says he is consistently in the top quarter of sellings, but in the bottom half of calls during the second half of the year.

Because he says he focuses on cultivating new business in Q1, and spends the rest of the year trying to convert prospects. Is that wise? Better people than me would have to determine the answer to that.

But I feel for him. Why, he wonders, should he be chastised for not spending more time inputting and cold calling? Now, I am not a sales manager, so I make no comment on who's right here, other than to say that what everyone in the loop wants ultimately are more dollar sales. Not more calls or meetings or whatnot. In his words:

I understand that the average seller needs to be prodded to keep prospecting. But I've been selling in this city for 5 years. I know most everyone, so there are a limited number of people to cold call. And I know the rhythm of the brands with money. When they are planning and when they are managing plans. Why should I be treated like the average seller? And why should I have my calls compared to a new seller in a new market?

Which is a long and winding way of explaining how Pipedrive views the challenge. Their focus is on creating an easy to use tool that asks only for need-to-know information, and plots clients and prospects in a multi-phase pipeline process.

Their solution is designed to:

Be easy to use
Require input of only the most relevant info
Objectives based
Provide both an individual deal view and a portfolio view for the company as a whole and for each seller.



The premise is that database management and interim tasks are only relevant as means to ends, not ends in themselves. The graphical display does a nice job of viewing the business as a sales funnel, with required steps at each phase to move things along and have a consistently growing book of business.

Here's the demo vid:



Back to my pal. His selling strategy may or may not be a good one, but the reason it may or may not be good relates less to whether he fills in every field of his Saleforce, or makes 19 versus 31 cold calls during the week of August 12, and more to do with his overall deal portfolio and how he drives progress within it.

That's what Pipedrive is about. Does he have the right number of deals at the various stages of the process? Does he know which companies to focus on when the quarter ends in three days and he's $78,000 under his quota?

I thought it was rather a cool and refreshing way of examining the challenge. Spend less time on tasks and more on moving your deals along, and closing them. And for the sales manager, the tool offers a great view of where her sellers are succeeding, and where they might need advice or a bit of prodding.