We’re hiring: JavaScript engineer, please join us

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We’re expanding our tech team and are looking for a bright software engineer to join us in our development office in Tallinn, Estonia.

First, some background on why it might be a good idea to work at Pipedrive.

We have lots of previous startup and business building experience, with several ex-Skypers in the team. We’ve participated in and raised money from AngelPad, gotten positive reviews from the likes of TechCrunch and Robert Scoble but most importantly – are loved and recommended by our users, including Kissmetrics, Fortumo, TechStars and WebMedia.

Our organization is very development driven – our goal is to build the fastest, easiest and most useful deal and sales management software ever. Today we have more than 1,200 paying customers from 55 different countries, and we’re growing double digits every month.

We are looking for a

Senior JavaScript Engineer

You will…

  • build and ship elegant JavaScript code
  • work with our back-end systems written in JavaScript and based on NodeJS
  • write high performance networking applications with 2-way sync capabilities across multiple 3rd party APIs in real-time
  • occasionally work with other parts of our back-end services that are written in PHP.

We hope that you…

  • know JavaScript and how to talk this language like a boss
  • have excellent communication skills in English
  • have built something using JavaScript in the past and preferably on top of NodeJS
  • know what Google V8 is and what it does
  • are passionate about what you do
  • are creative in finding elegant solutions to big problems.

You’ll get…

  • to choose the tools you want to work with
  • to be part of making important technical decisions
  • to work with like-minded people in a friendly environment
  • a good benefits package: base pay, stock options plan and more
  • no corporate bureaucracy
  • to make history and contribute back to the NodeJS community.

How to apply?

Contact us: founders @ pipedrive.com

Sales Pipeline Tips (part 2)

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This is the second part of my pipeline management tips, which hopefully gives you at least one idea on how to get more out of your sales pipeline.

In Part 1 I talked about how to add more and larger deals into your pipeline. There are two more things you can do to improve your pipeline metrics.

Increase Conversion

How awesome would it be if 1 out of 3 prospects ended up as a customer instead of 1 out of 10? The good news is that it can probably be done. The bad news is that it is certain to take time, and lots of personal practice.

7. Work with the right people. Working with final decision makers and influencers is like day and night. Decision makers are harder to reach but spend less of your time, influencers are easier to reach but end up using up all of your time. In my experience you’ll close much more talking to decision makers rather than influencers. And if you don’t get through to right people, you might need to work on that skill, or look for different prospects.

8. Go before you’re invited. I hate tenders. I really do. In case of tenders a potential customer has usually studied all the alternatives, and more or less made up their mind already. It takes enormous effort to change people’s minds when they’ve already formed their opinions. I’ve been much more successful when helping people form these initial opinions, so my practice has been to talk to prospects on my own schedule.

9. Stop working with wrong prospects as early as possible. Shamus Brown has put it well: You should only spend your time working with 70% of people you believe will buy from you. It’s more about searching for and finding opportunities rather than convincing. Figure out an ideal client profile and drop prospects with a non-buyer pattern as soon as possible, and keep searching for prospects with a better fit.

10. Make an effort to get to know your prospects’ businesses better than any of your competitors do. I once worked with a man who could close 50% of the deals he worked with. The reason why his customers bought from him was something to the line of: we felt that even though your price was higher, you understood what we need much better, and the solution you offered also showed that. Every time I wanted to increase my own win rate, I came back to this simple sentence.

Decrease The Time Needed to Close a Deal

I once asked a younger team-mate for his opinion on how long it was right for a prospect to ‘think about it’ before they made a decision. (The question was loaded, I admit.) His answer was ‘One week’. Hmm…

I’ve formed a strong opinion that it’s up to both prospect AND me how long a decision to buy should take. After all, my profit (and salary) depends on whether I close a deal in a week, 3 months or a full year.

11. Learn the decision process of a company that buys from you. It is very difficult to go faster than the ‘regular process’. However, it’s a matter of personal discipline to stop wasting time on your own end. Stop assuming and start asking along the lines of ‘What should we do next to take this further now?’, then listen and take notes. Step-by-step, it’s possible to discover how a particular company decides, and start noticing patterns how decisions are usually made in businesses of any industry.

12. Reduce the human tendency to ‘wait’ and ‘think about it’. Especially towards the beginning of my career I often feared losing a potential sale, so much so I didn’t dare to find out whether our offer was still a viable candidate. But the more experience I gained, the less time I gave for myself, as well as prospects, to decide whether to proceed to the next step. If someone said they needed to ‘think about it’, I responded with ‘Sounds good! Could you share what you want to think about exactly?’ or alike.

If a prospect said they wanted to consult with a colleague or boss, I made it my business to know when that conversation was due to happen. I could then continue with ‘So, if I called you tomorrow late afternoon, you’d be done with discussing and things are clear regarding the next step?’ More often than not, I got my answer then, not in one week.

13. Recognize lost deals early on. If a once good prospect has stays in the pipeline for long, you’ve probably lost them. If we really like something, we buy it quite fast, even in a corporate setting. If we are not sure, then we hang on and try to see if we start liking (or needing) it more or not. If you can’t move the prospect to take the next step, then probably it’s a good time to consider declaring the deal lost. Then, you can focus your attention and time to prospects that you actually can win.

You Can Only Improve What You Measure

Last but not least – improving these metrics is impossible without measuring them first. And this is another thing I love about working with sales pipeline – numbers honestly show how good of a salesperson I am, and what sort of results I’m capable of producing. One thing is certain – there are always numerous ways to improve on these metrics, and be happier with the results.

Photo courtesy: Topfer

How to manage writing a thesis with Pipedrive

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It’s extremely heartwarming to see Pipedrive used for things we could not even have dreamed about. We set out to do a simple sales app but we’ve already seen Pipedrive used in pet sitting, and as project management tool at Simpleshow. And it gets better. Elise Sass who looks after community at Startup Wise Guys recently used Pipedrive to keep the ducks of writing her Master’s thesis in row. In her own words:

Writing a master thesis can be quite difficult and time consuming, to say the least. In addition to all the requirements it’s sometimes hard to keep track what’s done and what still needs to be done. My paper to-do list got messy quickly and didn’t give the overview I needed. But a master’s thesis is a sum of quite similar processes and parts, especially when all the data has been gathered and you are already in the writing phase. This is where I started to use Pipedrive, to keep things in order and understand what parts I had finished and what I still needed to do.

I defined 6 stages in Pipedrive: Needs changes > Writing > For advisor > Sent to advisor > Ready to format > Completed.

At first I thought that it is just good to see how far the things were – especially to remember what parts I had sent to advisor, so I always knew whether I could continue writing or needed to wait for comments. Later I realized that I can use the “Deal value” field to mark how many comments I still had active in writing documents. Of course, my target was not to get the number higher as is the case in sales, but rather get it down to 0.

The commenting possibility under each deal allowed me to add some thoughts while the document was with my advisors. The task feature allowed me to add reminders what and when I should do – for example that I had promised to send a new version of Conclusions part to my advisor by a at certain time, or that I needed to add an additional chart to Results.

Pipedrive helped me a lot in having a constant overview of what was happening with my thesis. It may not seem like a lot but it really supported the long writing process. I’d recommend Pipedrive for the same purpose for others as well – maybe even inviting advisor to the same pipeline, so both the writer and the advisor could see what is happening and what to focus on.

Smart, no? If you or someone you know is in the process of writing a thesis and would like to use Pipedrive for that, you can get our Solo plan for free for 6 months with the promo code STUDENTSOLO.

Full disclosure: Elise is sister to one of our co-founders. That said, she started using Pipedrive for her thesis work on her own initiative and we didn’t have to force her to write about her experience. (Not too much, anyway.)

Sales Pipeline Tips (Part 1)

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I love the sales pipeline. It might sound weird to express affection towards a concept I can’t even touch physically, but I really do love it. And so should you, even if you’re not in sales. No matter whether you are a salesman, small business owner or charity fundraising expert, working with a deal pipeline makes your life so much easier. It brings out the best of people, and perhaps even more importantly, it makes things so much simpler to measure, manage and improve upon.

I’ve written about the basics of sales pipeline management here before. In a nutshell, here’s the best summary of working with your sales pipeline that I’ve heard:

  • The more deals you’re able to drive through your pipeline,
  • the bigger they are,
  • the better the percentage of them you are able to close, and
  • the less time it takes to get a customer,

… the bigger your revenue is, and your profit.

And it gets much more interesting when you ask yourself: how can I improve these sales pipeline metrics? I know at least 13 ways for that, and I’ll share these “secrets” in this two-part blog post.

Add more deals into your pipeline

When the sales pipeline is full of hot leads, there are a couple of big proposals to write, and meetings to attend, people tend to stop prospecting. I myself used to prospect in ‘waves’ – did it when pipeline was completely empty, and stopped when it was full. Which is a bad habit because results are so much better if you do it constantly.

So, how does one go from filling the pipeline when needed to constantly topping it up?

1. Create a list of new opportunities, every week. I remember that once our team set a goal to discover 10 new business opportunities per two-people team for every Monday morning meeting, we started to close more deals two months later already (this depends on a length of a sales cycle, of course).

2. Maintain this new standard for prospecting. Every new habit is painful to maintain until it becomes automatic. I’ve noticed that as soon as I “lifted the foot off the gas pedal”, weeks started to begin without this list, and pipeline started to drain (which you don’t notice immediately). Once you’ve set a specific goal (10 prospecting ideas a week, or 1 a day), make it clear that it’s a new standard, and lead the way.

3. Use multiple ways to create these lists. Besides the obvious cold calling to purchased lists or following up on inbound leads, here are some other ways that have worked for me:

  • Ask referrals from your existing customers, and people who did not want to buy from you.
  • Contact people who you have unsuccessfully tried to sell to before and/or people that you haven’t talked to in 6 months. Because circumstances change.
  • Keep track of job changes of your existing contacts, this could be a good basis to start a short conversation.
  • Be systematic about randomness – as you browse through news, drive to work, or to meetings, take notice of company signs, and give them a call.

Add larger deals into your pipeline

In my consulting career I often felt there was no way to increase an average sale, because our prices were already the highest in the market, and I already had a hard time selling it.

This was my weaker self trying to take over. The stronger self always knew that if I focused on the value of our service instead of its price, then it was possible to sell it both for a higher price as well as sell more of it to the same customer.

4. Focus on companies with bigger needs (and bigger budgets). I’m sure you’ve noticed the same – the bigger the potential of a particular customer, the less they want to talk to you. They simply have more people ‘knocking on their door’. However, if you want to close bigger deals, then you need to want to approach bigger prospects.

5. Find out why, when and how bigger companies buy, and execute your own proactive plan. Each client and client type is different and it’s nearly impossible to guess how they work. So I used to regularly invite key employees to lunch for getting to know how their business works and chatting in general. I found out that it was extremely useful to get to know who can say “yes” to bigger purchases in their company, and who can only say “no”.

6. Envision closing bigger deals. Usually people close deals that they perceive to be “normal” or “average”. But I’ve experienced that if a much larger deal starts to feel “normal” to me, it will be “normal” for other people I meet, too. So start from selling yourself the idea that you sell larger deals. You can also come up with logical add-ons and bundle multiple products or services into bigger offering. McDonald’s makes millions by asking “Would you like fries with that?”, what can you ask in your business?

I hope these tips help getting more out of your deal pipeline. If there’s anything I missed, please let me know in comments. Also, check out part 2 of Sales Pipeline Tips.

Photo courtesy: Ulrik

Calculate how tough you are with the NO calculator

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This Nike ad gives me goosebumps. “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life…and that is why I succeed”. In just 30 seconds failures are framed as a positive if not outright desirable.

Athletes know a thing or two about failure, and so does everyone that needs to close. Sales people, startup builders, consultants, CEO’s, investors, small business owners – everyone with a deal pipeline is bound to hear more  rejections than positive answers. And what Michael Jordan says about sports rings true elsewhere. NOs don’t stop you from succeeding, they help you succeed.

So we built the NO calculator. It’s visualizes the amount of NOs you have to hear for each deal closed. Have a play and see what your personal ‘rejections infographic’ looks like. And then make sure to share it, just like Michael Jordan did.

Pipedrive now has 1000+ paying customers, and how we got there.

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During the last weekend we got our thousandth paying customer. 1000 is not a big number, but as this number was zero a year ago it means a lot for our team. We’ve gotten good feedback and reviews throughout our existence but there is nothing that better proves that you’re doing your job well than having a thousand customers pay for it. Thank you, team members, said customers, investors and friends!

And instead of an Oscars-speech, I thought I’d look back at the beginning of our journey and try to find the main things that got us where we are today. To crystallize the learnings for ourselves, and make it available for everyone else who’s interested. So here you go, here are the three most important things that got us to our first thousand users.

When building the product, think pain, not features

The most important thing is having a good product. CRM is a crowded market and we’d be still hunting our 10th customer had we not gotten some things right (in addition to making many mistakes, like all startups do).

As a first time entrepreneur I hadn’t seen Dave McClure’s brilliant pain-killer vs. vitamins slides when we started the work with Pipedrive. But we were “lucky” because we had felt the pain of using a sales management software after more than a decade in sales and sales management.

What this meant in practical terms was that we knew we could and should have less features compared to competitors as long as our product eased the pain better. For many CRM users the biggest pain is the feeling of not having control over the many valuable but not yet closed leads. The feeling of not being organized and missing out on sales. So we focused on building the best pipeline manager we could and put many seemingly important features under the hood, or aside.

It wasn’t (and isn’t) always easy. While juggling between your day job and your startup project it’s bloody hard to say ‘no you can’t do that with our software’ to a potential customer, but we quickly learned to ignore all one-off customer asks. We treat feature requests as “pain sensations” and really pay attention to those that are asked several times. Even then, most end up at the bottom of our feature build list which is not to say we ignore what customers say. We recently fast-tracked advanced privacy settings to the top of our roadmap because we had underestimated the pain that not having this had created.

Get your product into the hands of the right people

Once we had built and launched Pipedrive, we were thrilled to hear that we did indeed ease the pain of our customers, but some months later we weren’t too happy about our growth. On month four our revenues barely covered our hosting costs and we were growing a measly 10-20% per month. It was only after we had managed to get our product to the hands of the right users that our revenue growth graph took a much more exciting angle. 


Product was the same, the only difference was that it was now used by more influencers, thought leaders and other people who are often asked for software recommendations. We tried numerous things to achieve that but the following two gave the most tangible result:

- Applying to incubators like AngelPad, YCombinator and Seedcamp to meet people with unbelievably big networks. We applied and talked to many, got invited to AngelPad in the end and spent three months among entrepreneurs and mentors, most of the time pitching and talking to people.
- Running a good deal to get cost-conscious techies aboard. Our AppSumo offer worked very well.

Make getting or signing up to your product or service as easy as possible

Well, isn’t it already? This was my reaction to someone’s feedback 8 months ago. As we found out, it was not easy at all. We confused people with loads of content and provided several call to actions eg. sign up, choose a package, read about features or see a live demo.

We then put most of the text from the front page to other pages. We removed as many hurdles from the registering path as we could, even the package selection page had to go. We figured that if people like the product they can be bothered with settings and details later. Feel free to click on the screenshot to get the full scope on our initial mistakes.

AB testing showed that making these changes resulted in 3 times higher conversions from visits to sign-ups.

So there you go. What got us to a thousand paying customers was addressing pain, getting the product into the hands of the right people and making it easy to sign up.  Sounds easy, right? And this is not to say time spent on going the extra mile in support, sending kick-ass emails, blogging or other activities is a waste of time. We did lots of different things in our first 18 months and almost all of them contributed to our growth. But had we only focused on these three things  we would still be in more or less the same place. It’s probably different for most other startups, and I hope you’ll agree that the journey to discover them is bloody exciting.

I hope to see you all at our five-digit milestone!

Photo courtesy: Arinas74

Can we motivate you to send us “motivational quotes”?

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You may have noticed that notifications from Pipedrive end with “motivational quotes” like:

You’re receiving this email because you are not Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris doesn’t need to sell, people buy from him.

or

You’re a born deal closer. If not today then some day.

We reckoned these quotes would make these official-sounding notifications a little more interesting, and so far people seemed to have liked them. It’s good fun coming up with these tongue-in-cheek quotes, and it’s time to let you have some as well. Please add your funny and motivational quotes in comments, and the best ones will have an eternal life in Pipedrive. We also reserve the right to send our T-shirts to three authors of best quotes.

Photo on poster by APatterson

We Built Cross-Item Filters to Give You More Customizing Power

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With Pipedrive, you can use filters to create different types of reports regarding deals, organizations, people and products (more on how to do it in one of the previous posts). We took a step further and built cross-item filters because we wanted to break free from combining just single item fields for reports. So, now you can mix different item fields in a filter and make full use of connections and custom fields you’ve already built in Pipedrive.

In business terms, you can create lists of

  • companies from Southeast region who you have open deals with in progress,
  • all companies you’ve sold (or attempted to sell) a new line of products (Leadership Training) to this year,
  • all people with whom a deal is in progress and have currently entered stage ‘Testing’ (so you could send some extra information to them),
  • VIP category people in your database your salespersons have not been able to start any deals with this year, and so on.

Let me show how you get your hands on this enhanced customizing power. Suppose that for your purposes, you want to a list of people who work in companies that are based in a state of California (or anywhere, for this matter).

First, go to ‘People‘ page. Click on the drop-down at the top right corner and select ‘Create a new filter set…‘.

A window opens where you can set conditions to your filter, and also name it, so you could find it easily in the future. Let’s start from setting up the right conditions. Click on ‘Add condition‘. Now, there are two things you can do:

  1. First, by clicking on the little portrait icon, you can change the type of condition. You can choose between deals, people, organizations, and products. As you change the condition, notice that its icon changes, too.
  2. Second you can select property of the condition from the drop-down menu. This shows you all default and custom fields for the chosen item.

Since I need the list of people who work in a company based in California, I’ll change the condition type to ‘Organizations’. Why? Because I know I have a custom field under organizations that is called ‘States’. By using common sense, I guess that should give me a list of people who work in organizations based in California.

Right, I’ll type in the name of the state (CA, this is how I’ve used it in our database). I’ll name the filter “People in California”, and hit ‘Save‘.

And there it is – I can see we do have 9 people in our database who work in an organization that is based in California. Besides, it appears that with 2 of them we have an open deal in progress.

But I want more. I just got curious – I know James has been working with these people, and I would like to see to which of these people he has already offered our leadership products. It’s a new product category, and we need to get this to market. So, I’ll open the same filter by clicking ‘Edit‘.

I’ll add another condition, change the condition type to ‘Products’ (because there I have the custom field ‘Category’), and choose ‘Leadership Training’ from the options. 

And hit ‘Save‘ (I’ll change the name of the filter later).

Mhmm, he’s offered the new category to Alberta only … Looks like it’s a good time to have a short chat with James, and find out what’s been holding him back.

So there it is. Find your way to cross-item filters, play with the conditions, and get the sales tracking info you need to make decisions that matter for your business.

Stay tuned!

Sales productivity app? For Simpleshow, Pipedrive is project management software

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Recently we learned that a Germany-based animation studio is using Pipedrive as a project management tool in addition to managing sales with it. We were very curious to learn more and so the company’s CEO Jens Schmelzle took us through the details.

Simpleshow are makers of 3-minute videos that explain complex issues, products or services, using only two hands and black-and-white illustrations. Each simpleshow is 100% custom-made and handcrafted. Since 2008 the company has produced more than 700 clips (which look awesome) in over 30 languages for customers worldwide.

Simpleshow has a fixed production workflow for the clips. As Jens explained, they were searching for a project management tool that allowed representing this workflow for a big amount of parallel projects (and their statuses) in a visual and intuitive way, so accessing information wouldn’t take a lot of time. The problem was that most project management systems they tested were built for managing one big project with lots of tasks, not lots of parallel projects with the same workflow.

What Jens and his team liked about Pipedrive, and despite it being a sales tool, was having a very clear overview, with deeper information just a click away (for example by clicking on the name of organisation). They also liked the speed of adding new projects and people, and that everything was saved and linked in the database automatically. This was something they hadn’t experienced with other platforms, wikis or spreadsheets they had used.

Pipedrive was the first software that met all of Simpleshow’s requirements of having a simple overview combined with filtering options for customers, resources and timelines in a smart way. The company started using it as a CRM and project management software. As it worked “incredibly well” Simpleshow decided for Pipedrive to be the company’s central platform for ALL(!) their project data.

How Simpleshow is using Pipedrive in Jens’s own words

I have attached the pipeline of one of our project managers. I’ve blurred out the sensitive data, you can see that our project manager Ilya has 21 projects to manage right now, most of them are in the first stages of production (script or text concept phase). Our main phases are: 

1. Text concept (red comments on the screenshot)

After the official order, we start with a short questionnaire which the customer has to fill out. Then we have a personal briefing – a meeting, phone or video conference- after which we write a text concept including a description of the visuals.

2. Storyboard (blue comments)

After the concept approval, one of our illustrators draws the storyboard which is presented to the customer for another approval.

3. Production (yellow comments)

As soon as we get the GO, the scribbles are printed on a special paper, cut out, and, where appropriate, some bricolages are being prepared. After the shoot in our inhouse studio and the audio recording there is the video and audio editing, the music arrangement, color correction, mastering and encoding. Then the project manager sends the finished clip for the final approval.

Every clip is a separate Deal in Pipedrive, which we just drag and drop through the production line. We work with several pipelines: One for sales, one for project managers (example above), one for the post production and some for special animations or individual projects. So the post production workflow has its own stages like “audio recording”, “shooting”, “editing”, “sound”, “color correction & encoding”,… Each deal leaves the project manager’s pipeline after phase 2b to the post production pipeline and is dragged back in some days later, when the clip is produced and ready to send to the customer.

Going forward, Jens and the Simpleshow team want to combine Pipedrive with their timekeeping tool mite and build relevant interfaces so everything works in the same central project database. Jens says they need an API for that – and reading how thoroughly Pipedrive is used made us move even faster for getting that ready soon.

Adjust Privacy Settings in Pipedrive

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It took us longer than we wanted, but you can now edit privacy settings in Pipedrive. This way you can make sure people in your team see the data you want them to see, and don’t see what you don’t want them to see. Let me walk you through what you can do.

To start, go to Settings > Privacy. Basically, there are two ways you can make changes here:

1. By changing the default visibility of items added to Pipedrive;2. By switching on or off the visibility of specific items.First of all, let me remind you that all these changes affect the data visibility for regular users, not for admin users. For example, if you are an admin user, then you will always see everything there is to see in Pipedrive. To change the user status from regular to admin, or vice versa, go to Settings > Users.

Changing the Default Visibility of Items Added to Pipedrive

We categorize deals, organizations, people, products and Pipedrive users as ‘items‘ in Pipedrive. These items can be visible to everyone using Pipedrive, owner of the item, or followers of the item. (To follow or unfollow specific items in Pipedrive, check my post on following.)

If you have selected the ‘Everyone‘ button, it literally means that it’s ok for you that everyone in your company can see everybody’s data.

If you want to make people see only the data they enter, or items you assign them to, select ‘Owner only‘. This options lets you operate Pipedrive in a way where team members can not see each other’s items (i.e. organizations, deals, etc.).

By selecting ‘Followers only‘, owners of items can make other team members follow these and therefore see the specifically selected data.

Switching On or Off the Visibility of Specific Items

Besides adjusting default visibility, you can also enable some specific visibility rights.

  1. The first one is most interesting – by selecting ‘Yes’, users can change the visibility of items themselves, too. When you switch it ‘No’, users can not change the default visibility at all.
  2. If it’s okay for you that people can export long lists of data (like a list of organizations, or people) easily to CSV or Excel, enable ‘Yes’, if not, select ‘No’.
  3. This one explains itself. With ‘No’ selected, only admin users can delete deals.
  4. ‘No’ here means that a user of Pipedrive can not see overall statistics of the company, with ‘Yes’ selected they can access this page, too.
  5. You can use the last switch to make users see or not see each other statistics.

We continue working to give you more power to adjust different privacy settings. I do hope the settings available to you now help you take a step forward in running the business the way you want to.

Stay tuned!