Tooploox has been around for almost six years and we’ve grown from three people to 110 during this time. Yet we only created our business development department two years ago and it was not an easy challenge – the hardest part was finding the right tools for the task.
Our first magnificent way to keep track of our clients and progress was…well…Excel.
We knew that there was a huge offer of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and sales tracking tools on the market, but most of them had way too many features that we didn’t need or their prices were quite steep. After going through the usual suspects, we found a fairly young solution, coming out of one the most tech-focused countries in Europe: Estonia.
Its name was Pipedrive.
Nowadays, Pipedrive is used all over the place and its easy integration with tools such as Slack, Trello and Woodpecker makes it not only useful but also very cost effective. It’s easy to use, easy to setup and it has helped us to create a process that works at our own pace and with our own goals. In other words, it gives us complete control and puts us in the (pipe)driving seat.
Here is a list of our favorite features and how are we using them to create and maintain business in Tooploox.
Customisable pipeline / multiple pipelines
No two business processes are the same and we had to create our own from the scratch, so this feature gave us plenty of flexibility and a great overview of what’s going on with our leads. You can easily customize different pipelines for different kind of leads and apply different sales processes accordingly. In our case, we could even give the right priority to certain leads and also go back to “lost” leads to gain a thorough understanding of what happened there.
Slack integration
The best part of this is that you don’t have to be a hacker or tech whiz to figure how to do it. We, like other companies, are using Slack as our main medium of communication, both for organizing ourselves and for our office gossiping, too. With the Slack integration, it is so easy to keep track of any new incoming leads and, this way, we know who is working on what and the volume of work the incoming business requires. As soon as we add a new lead to Pipedrive, Boom! You get notified so you can ask questions or just pat your colleague on the back.
Mail Integration
Pipedrive gives you a “ghost” account that you can Cc or Bcc in any of your outgoing emails. This way, Pipedrive keeps a record of what has been written to leads and new clients, as well as a better understanding of the communication between us and them. At the moment, we have a “Silver” plan but, when updating to the “Gold” plan which is only a bit more expensive, you can access a pandora’s box of email and integration options.
Calendar Integration
Whether it’s for Google, Apple or any other calendar, having a simple way to add meetings or syncs to it is a must and, even though it is not a unique feature, Pipedrive’s integration shows how it puts simplicity and efficiency as its main advantage. If that’s not enough, you can also enable your clients to choose a time on your open slots for meetings, so you have the best of a bunch of single option solutions, all blended in one easy-to-use feature.
Mobile app
As business developers, a lot of our work time takes place abroad, as talks, seminars, and conferences are a great place to network and find new clients and partners. The last thing you want to do during these events is to carry too much stuff, so having the whole Pipedrive in the palm of your hand comes very handy (pun intended).
When you meet someone, you can add them to your drive straight away, set a meeting and anything else you need, all from a well-thought-out app that keeps the whole power of Pipedrive ready to go at any time, without having to take your old mac full of stickers and slowing down the process. Besides, those business cards get lost very easily!
Some of these features could be very common in CRM solutions, but the simplicity of Pipedrive’s use and design was something that caught our attention and it was a determining factor when having to choose a tool that is great to start with, yet also scales with you and your business.
These days, Pipedrive is a core tool for our sales and business development; we can easily track our success and identify errors in our process. We love the way they are always planning their next step and how open they are to our suggestions as end users. Give it a go – you will not be dissapointed.
