In our modern age of rapid digital advancement, it’s important for businesses to adapt in order to better serve their customers and also compete in the marketplace. Businesses of all sizes could greatly benefit by using a CRM provider to help them manage their sales, follow up with leads, provide customer support, run reporting, and many other business-related operations. A proper CRM provider can help businesses improve all aspects of their business.
There are a ton of different CRM providers out in the marketplace and businesses are often left with a plethora of different questions such as:
- What are all the features that my business requires?
- How will the software work if I need to scale my operation?
- Are there cheaper alternatives?
- Is it too complicated to use?
- How is the training and support?
These are common questions faced by different types of business owners who are in the process of picking the right CRM provider for their operation. In this post, we will compare two of the most popular CRM software providers on the web: PipeDrive vs SalesForce.
Recommended Reading: The 10 Best Sales Management Tools For Growing Businesses
PIPEDRIVE VS SALESFORCE: COMMON FEATURES
If you are looking for a CRM solution for your business, chances are that you most likely come across Pipedrive and Salesforce throughout your process. They are both full-scale state-of-the-art CRM solutions that are rivaled by a few. Let’s take a look at some of the most common features that are shared by these tools.
Contact Management – Both of these tools allow you to accurately track your calls, emails and contact history so you can have visibility and control of your daily schedule in an organized way.
Lead Management – Both of the platforms allow you to fully manage your leads and deal-flow by creating custom sales pipelines along with full automation through custom webforms and chatbots.
Customized Reporting – Reporting is a very important component to measuring the success and struggles of your business. Pipedrive and SalesForce both offer you the ability to run custom reports which show the most valid metrics for your business.
Sales Automation Features – There are certain tasks inside business operations that can be fully handled by your CRM. PipeDrive and SalesForce can help you eliminate cumbersome day to day busywork through automation.
Email Integration – Both platforms offer the ability to integrate to almost any email provider on the market and allow you to seamlessly manage all your subscribers and customers without any issues.
These are just some of the most common features that are offered and shared between PipeDrive and SalesForce. But, obviously as a business looking to find the ideal CRM provider, these features aren’t enough to make a decision.
Let’s dive deeper into each tool and see which one could be a better fit for your business operationally and financially.
PIPEDRIVE
Overview
Regardless of how much experience you have selling your product, PipeDrives’ goal is to make it easier by focusing on bringing you better, higher quality leads around the clock. This allows you to focus on the right leads at the right time. By knowing which leads you should focus on, you can convert more of them to paying customers or direct sales inside your pipeline.
As the name implies, “Pipedrive” gives you the ability to create custom sales pipelines in order to help you manage and focus on your leads in a visual way. The interface is very intuitive to use and it makes managing and moving leads inside your pipeline extremely useful.
Calls and emails are automatically tracked which helps give you a visual representation of the stage at which your lead and follow up stand.
It’s a great way to make sure you stand up to date on previous conversations and expectations you may have had with your leads.
Pipedrive Features Review
Simplicity of Use
One of the best features of Pipedrive is the platform’s overall simplicity of use. It has an intuitive design which is essential to getting your operation up and running. This is ideal for small businesses who are growing and need a solution to manage their sales pipeline.
Pipedrive allows you to create custom workflows which are designed with different pipeline stages to help you manage your deals. From there you can schedule different activities for your deals such as:
- Calls
- Tasks
- Meetings
- Lunches
- Emails
These activities within your deals pipeline allow you to create a more intimate relationship with your leads and allow you to be on top of your sales game.
Communication Tracking
Another great feature of Pipedrive is the ability to track communication from every stage of your deal. You can track calls, emails and contact history in order to see exactly where a deal stands inside your pipeline process. This is done by creating a custom contacts timeline.
This allows you to see a visual representation of your contact timeline and see where you need to push in order to close your deals.
Automation Capabilities
Pipedrive can also help you scale your business by creating automations and also giving you automation recommendations. This can be customized through its sales assistant feature which allows you to identify areas in which you can apply automation to help you improve your workflow.
Pro tip: check out Zapier if you want to automate workflows between tools.
Reporting
Every CRM should have strong reporting capabilities in order for you to make sense of your performance and company data. Pipedrive has custom dashboards which can give you plenty of insights into your activities, deals, revenues and lead conversion.
These types of reports can help you understand performance and where you can make improvements inside your sales pipeline. It’s also a great way of helping your company stay on quarterly or yearly targets.
PipeDrive Pricing Options
Pipedrive has very affordable CRM solutions for businesses and as you can see it’s best suited for small to mid scale sized businesses and teams. Their pricing is also very competitive when compared to similar CRM providers.
Pros and Cons of Pipedrive
No CRM tool is perfect or meant for every type of business out there. Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of PipeDrive.
Pros
- Ease of Use
- Intuitive UI design
- Custom Reporting Capabilities
- Long list of app integrations
- Communication tracking is top notch
- Very affordable options
- Can create custom pipelines and deal stages
Cons
- Meant for small to mid scale businesses
- Doesn’t offer integrations with larger scale companies such as SAP or Oracle
- Limited solutions and features to handle marketing
Salesforce
Overview
When it comes to a full-scale CRM solution Salesforce is in a league of their own. They have a massive suite of diverse products for businesses in all sort of industries such as:
- Financial Services
- Healthcare and Life Sciences
- Communications
- Consumer Goods
- Public Sector
- Manufacturing
- Media
- Energy and Utilities
- Philanthropy
Their full suite of products allow you as a business owner to get a full scale view of your customers experience. Their suite of Salesforce customer 360 products include:
- Tools for Marketing
- Service
- E-commerce
- Custom Analytics and Reporting
- Long list of app integrations
- Employee Experience
Salesforce Customer 360 allows you to bring your company and customers into one integrated view for full transparency in order unites your marketing, sales, ecommerce, services, IT and much more.
Salesforce Features Review
Salesforce has a plethora of different products and services that can make your head spin. As a business owner it can be difficult to understand how to even begin using them. The great part is though you can chat directly with their support staff to get an idea of the product or service that will fit your needs.
Their Customer 360 is full of full scale apps that are ready to help you manage any component of your business and it’s operations. From sales to marketing, eCommerce and advanced analytics they literally have it all.
Platform Design
Salesforce’s overall platform design can be a bit overwhelming if you have never used a CRM provider in the past. There’s an overwhelming amount of options at your disposal and there is typically a decent learning curve associated with it.
Once you do learn the components required to run your operations, everything becomes much easier and fluid.
Salesforce is essentially made up of many different smaller applications which are meant to help you run your business. From the top of the menu you can see you have apps such as:
- Lead management
- Account creation
- Contacts
- Opportunities
- Cases
- Tasks
- Calendar
- Reports
- Dashboards
Within these individual apps you create important operational tasks and functions in order to help your business move forward. I’m sure you can already see how this already appears much more complicated when compared to Pipedrive simple layout.
Communication
A great feature of Salesforce is its ability to integrate to pretty much any email provider on the planet with no problem. Salesforce allows you to directly import your leads or contacts inside their contacts and email template app and get to work.
You don’t have quite the tracking capabilities for communication when compared to Pipedrive but it’s still very functional. You can however communicate seamlessly with your team members directly through Chatter. It’s a great way to bring attention to important topics that need to be addressed.
Reporting Functionality and Analytics
Salesforce does not take reporting lightly. You can basically create any type of report you can imagine.
They have different reports you can pull from a massive list of report types that are available directly inside the reporting portal.
If you wanted to take your analytics to the next level inside your business Salesforce provides you with that ability with integrations and access to Tableau.
This essentially puts a magnifying glass to the performance and behavior of your business and allows you to see which parts of your business cause changes in other areas. It’s data on steroids.
This is meant for larger scale businesses but it’s an incredible option to have if you want a holistic view of every component of your business.
Salesforce Pricing Options
Salesforce has a ton of different pricing options depending on the size and needs of your business. Their most basic pricing option comes inside the small business section.
They have affordable options for small to mid sized business but also offer a ton of different pricing options depending on what your business needs.
While Pipedrive is meant for small to mid scale businesses, Salesforce is built to support any size business that may have massive demands. Explore their pricing page and see what option might be a good fit for your business.
Pros and Cons of SalesForce
Pros
- More features than Pipedrive
- Advanced reporting and Analytics options
- Integration to SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics
- Advanced forecasting and data analytics through Einstein AI
- Supports Almost any industry
- Industry standard
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- Much more expensive than Pipedrive with additional features
- Platform is a bit clunky and difficult to navigate for beginners
Salesforce Vs Pipedrive: The Final Conclusion
Both Salesforce and Pipedrive can provide your business with great solutions to help you manage your operations. When it comes to making the decision of picking your CRM provider you need to take a step back and look at the needs of your business and ask a few important questions.
- What stage is your business in? (startup, growth, maturity)
- What components of my business are struggling?
- In what areas can my employees improve?
- What is my working budget?
- How much of my business operations am I looking to automate?
Once you have answered these questions you can have a better idea of the features and functionalities that your business needs from a CRM provider.
Why Use Pipedrive
If you are a small to medium sized business that needs a clear cut and simple way to manage your sales process, people and their operational day to day tasks, Pipedrive is the better option for you.
Why Use Salesforce
If your business is much larger and is moving towards the enterprise level, requiring more features to help you run your day to day operations, Salesforce is the better option. It will provide you with more features and flexibility to create customized solutions that will help you manage your teams and drive results.
So, we hope that after going through this article you have a better idea of the right CRM provider to use for your business and operations.
Pipedrive & Salesforce CRM Alternatives
See below a list of CRM alternatives that could be a better choice based on your needs. Use the filters to find the best tool for you. Looking for a CRM as an SMB? Check out this blog.