One of Pipedrive’s first customers is Fortumo, a fast-growing mobile payments provider. Their services are available in more than 60 countries and currently used by around 60 000 service-providers that have created over 206 000 services. We had a chat with Martin Koppel, co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Fortumo to understand how and why they use Pipedrive.
For context – what is Fortumo’s sales process like?
Our sales pipeline has 6 stages with the final stage that states the client is live. Every salesman has at least 10 active deals in the pipeline, each of them very valuable to us. Our typical sales cycle is about 2 – 7 months, the longer it is the higher the risk that some deals don’t get enough attention. As a sales manager I need to know the stage each deal is at, so I know when to react and offer support. I also need to see how long time a deal has been in that specific stage.
What CRM software were you using before Pipedrive, and what made you switch to a beta of a brand new service?
Before we started to use Pipedrive, we had settled on Highrise after trying out several other tools. Our biggest problem was that it took too long to get a good overview of our open sales. Our sales meetings were mostly updates about deals. This process took a lot of time since our sales team grew quickly to 10 people and more. And we had to do it all over again each week. To save at least some time, we used a whiteboard for pipeline visualization and Highrise for contacts and todo lists.
We were searching for a good visual overview for a while. At first we started to use Pipedrive with our strategic partnerships pipeline, where one deal can take many months to close. The right tool is critical for us as most of our business development team is travelling around the world. We also liked Pipedrive’s clear focus on deals, not contacts or companies. Often we have several deals with the same company, and every deal has different contacts, setup and todo list.
What’s changed since you switched to Pipedrive?
Today our sales meetings are totally different. Now we don’t need to waste any time on updates and are focused on agreeing next actions, plans to be more effective and improve sales.
We are using 3 different pipelines already. One for sales, the other for new markets, because negotiations and bureaucracy with mobile operator can take up to a year, and a third one for platform integrations which is quite a complicated process.
We started with 5 users, but today we have more than 20 active daily users in Pipedrive. Biggest benefit for us is that our team can now close sales faster and I spend less time with sales “management”.
We’re thrilled to have Fortumo as our customer and to see our product makes a difference. We’re also very grateful they had the guts to jump onto our slightly buggy beta back in November 2010. - Ragnar Sass.
Quote Roller is a tool for creating, sending and tracking proposals, and they’ve just added a Pipedrive integration. If you’re a customer of both services, you can move data between the two very easily.