Why We Built Pipedrive

Hi my name is Timo and I’m a co-founder of Pipedrive.

More than 10 years ago I found myself on the streets, selling books door-to-door near Blossom Hill Road, San Jose, CA. Not the easiest type of sales to start with, but I have been selling ever since. So, is that the sizzle or the steak that I have been after? I really don’t know, they are both pretty exciting things :)

Anyway, I joined 2 guys with the aim to grow a small company into a market leader, and we did achieve this. The biggest catalyst for this success came from active sales. We just never let go and those efforts brought the results. As our team and ambitions grew we needed to be smarter about client leads and not calling the same company twice so we made an obvious move to purchase our first CRM program. Then, our second because the first one didn’t quite cut it. And about two years ago we bought a ‘proper’ CRM for more than 25,000 dollars. And it worked … kind of.

At times we were ‘good boys’ with the software we were using, we filled in all those fields and tried to make some sense out of all these reports. At times we were ‘bad boys’ - we skipped some fields or entering some client altogether, starting a “oh, they never use our CRM, so why should I” movement among our team members. I must confess, we have even been ‘cunning boys’ - mixing CRM software with Excel spreadsheets and spending countless hours keeping them synchronised and updated. Here’s what we learned - most CRM software don’t help you increase sales, but mutate into huge “warehouses” of customer information.

After 10 years of regressive mating with CRM-s and still wanting to sell as much as possible, we felt so cornered that one day we just decided that we have to create a CRM of our own. But not alike we had seen and used before - we needed a tool that would help us sell the way we’re used to. The one we would like and use.

So we created Pipedrive.

1. We wanted a simple (but powerful) tool.

Not because we’re lazy - to the contrary, because we’re busy calling over the phone, being in the meetings, writing proposals, following up on previous actions and so on. It takes a lot of real work to sell and the first thing we’d do with any software was to find the shortest way around. To be honest, these roads were never short.

This is why we created Pipedrive to be as simple as possible to use and packed all the necessary sales functionalities “under the hood”. Pipedrive takes your deals in the making (aka sales pipeline) and holds them in front of your eyes as your single most important focus. Everything else is set aside and can be reached when you please.

We’ve seen too many times that when really good salespeople want to or need to have a good sales day, they’d tend to push everything aside and focus on talking with people. So, you don’t want software that slows you down - you want one that gives you what you need in an instant and then gets out of the way.

2. We wanted to feel good and excited in the midst of all our efforts.

When do you feel good in sales?

Well, we feel good when we
a) have just received a big “yes” to our offer, or
b) know we are getting ever so closer to the next of these “yes-s”.

Take running for instance. Imagine you went out to run 5 miles and at halfway through mark you notice (with the help of some good tool :)) that you are well on track to record your best time. How does that make you feel? Sure, you are still far from finish, but knowing what just saw gives you an instant boost of power and confidence. Without a tool that enables you to know this, you’d probably have to continue with just a hope (if you can) and increasing levels of fatigue.

The same goes for sales. When we’re tracking not one, but many races at the same time, then at halfway through mark …we could feel exhausted! And we do. It is difficult to tell how well we’re doing if we’re managing many processes at once and all of them at different stages. Software we have used always wanted us to fill in many fields but did not quite equally respond with good and instant information. This is why we created Pipedrive to be a sales tracking tool that measures all this and helps you figure out whether you are on track to success.

Can Pipedrive grow your sales, too?

Creating a news sales management tool (not a customer relatonship tool, see?) wasn’t always smooth sailing and our team members will be sharing our most important learnings and tips on this blog. We’ll also be giving tips on how to grow sales that are not related to Pipedrive, so please do bookmark this page, or follow us on Twitter.

For now, we’re excited to say that Pipedrive is ready and we have 26 customers using it heavily and happily. I warmly recommend taking a look and having a play - we have free trials available for all plans so it doesn’t cost a cent. Please keep in mind we’re not done yet - we keep on developing it to make Pipedrive both simpler and more powerful. So, please write to me or post a comment if you have questions, observations or just good old feedback.