For B2B startups, CRM is a critical tool not only to keep track of prospective customers but also to efficiently communicate with stakeholders including employees and investors.
At our startup, we send the most up-to-date pipeline of all prospective customers to the stakeholders every two weeks. This regular update helps me as a CEO to grasp the overall sales activity of the company and get proper feedback from them. Sometimes we get a direct sales channel via an introduction from the stakeholders. This is another reason why I encourage other startups to do the same.
I believe all employees at any level at an early stage startup should have access to CRM, understand what is going on at the company, and dive deep into an individual project if they want to. This is one of the fundamental rights that should be given to the people working at a startup.
We have been using HubSpot about a year and decided to switch to Pipedrive. This wasn’t the easiest decision to make because we knew what it takes to transition from one CRM to another from our previous experience when we migrated from eSales Manager (Japanese CRM/SFA developed by Softbrain) to HubSpot. But yet we moved to new CRM. Why?
First off, the price was just too expensive. Thanks to HubSpot’s startup program where they were giving us a 50% discount for the professional line of their product. Despite this discount, we weren’t able to add all employees to CRM because doing so would have resulted in nearly $2,000 per month just for CRM and it’s simply too much to pay for the early stage startup.
Next, I was not able to track all email conversations between our sales team and prospective customers in chronological order. Yes, I know HubSpot provides that feature called Team Activity in Sales Dashboard, but it limited to only the most recent 20 email conversations. If I were to look up any older email conversation, then I was forced to look into an individual project and see the conversation there. This was a very time-consuming task at least to me.
Lastly, HubSpot had lots of marketing features that weren’t relevant to us. Again, we know HubSpot offers a separate line of product for marketing purpose but we felt we were paying a bit extra for those marketing features bundled with CRM. We just wanted to use the CRM part of HubSpot and pay for it.
Amongst many CRM solutions available in the market today. Pipedrive caught my eyes. I knew about Pipedrive since 2015 or so but I thought it wasn’t for us because of a lack of Japanese support. However, when I saw this press release saying they opened the official Japanese website and support in Japanese, it changed my mind and made me test-drive this new CRM.
Long story short, now we are finally able to add ALL employees to the same CRM while maintaining the monthly cost significantly low as compared to HubSpot. I can see all email conversations at a single place called Email (Wow, it cannot be more simpler than that!) and Pipedrive excels in just one category, which is CRM. There is no additional marketing feature that we don’t use and don’t want to pay for.
For those who haven’t tried Pipedrive, here is a personal invitation from me. You will get an extended 30-day trial if you apply for a trial through my invitation. Let me know how you use this CRM at your organization.