Pipedrive vs. Salesforce.com

Pipedrive's lead management features are top-notch, particularly the ability to automate email correspondence and receive alerts when necessary. It has an excellent pipeline, opportunity management, and sales automation without coding: —Exceptional cost-effectiveness. —User-friendliness. —Usability. —Top-notch search filter. However, its speed could be increased because adding new actions requires numerous taps and swipes.

Incentivized

Salesforce is so customizable that I can't think of situations where you couldn't configure the tool to do what you need. If Salesforce hasn't developed the capability itself, there is a marketplace where anyone else can develop and upload their solution for others to use as well. Also, due to Salesforce's success and size, almost every other app/software that you can think of has or is working on an integration with Salesforce. So if you need to use a different tool for a certain function, you can more likely than not still integrate it with Salesforce to enhance value.

Incentivized

• Great visual visibility of the funnel plus easy to drag the deals across the stages
• The email integration that collects all relevant communication (also through the possibility of adding a deal-specific Pipedrive address on BCC)
• The integration with Pandadoc, which we use a lot, so that Pipedrive keeps a really handy overview of the documents we have sent out / which have been signed

• Salesforce.com is extremely customizable. I would not consider it an out-of-the-box solution, although its standard fields allow for fundamental CRM activities and reporting.
• Salesforce.com is able to integrate with 100s of third-party softwares—often times creating efficiencies in processes.
• Reports within Salesforce.com have the ability to be simple as a standard Account report, or you can get very granular with your report filtering to segment a very specific result, eg. Accounts in California who are active clients and fall within the pharmaceutical industry and have a specified market capitalization.

Incentivized

• Showing the customers name on the pipeline page. Right now I can only get it to show the brand name twice. I wish it would replace the second brand name with the main point of contact.
• Better reporting tools. Their reporting tools are not easy to pick up. I've spent time trying to figure it out and it isn't something I can pick up on quickly.
• Better training options. I wish I had a personal trainer to walk me through the best way to use Pipedrive so I can get the most out of it.

Incentivized

• The Knowledge module can be improved. It is still limited compared to regular CMS. Still not possible to have a filter view per data categories
• Using the Community portal also comes with a limited Community reply function that doesn´t allow text formatting. Very difficult to move staff away from emailing customers when this text box is very poor
• Rigidity when you work in a big organization with same template. It needs to be a one fits all instance and the local needs are deprioritized because SF doesn´t allow customization

Incentivized

-2 for Its cost and +8 for the need of tracking of leads and monitoring of team.

Incentivized

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

There is a learning curve that caused a slow adoption but overall the UI looks great and the support is helpful when there is an issue that you need to be addressed. The marketplace integrations (developed by Pipedrive) could definitely use some work as they're not as seamless as we'd hoped for!

Incentivized

I'm a Millenial and more tech savvy, so learning this tool is more intuitive and I don't mind learning the ins and outs of the product. It can be cumbersome when permissions or new rules by our admins get enacted, that can cause disruptions in our workflows and annoyances. Overall, the usability is fine, and helps in my day to day more than causes disruptions

Incentivized

Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.

Incentivized

Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure

Between quick video tutorials and having very quick feedback from their support teams, it is one of the main reasons I would recommend Pipedrive. It is critical, especially when setting up the platform to meet your companies needs, that a solid support team like Pipedrive has is there to make the transition easier.

Incentivized

The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

Experiment is the only way to start

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

I much prefer the interface of Pipedive when compared to Zoho. Much more user friendly and the team is always readily available when we need them. Pipedrive allowed for many custom integrations to be added, as Zoho was a tad more complicated to manipulate. We would not go back to Zoho in any case.

Incentivized

I've used Act CRM by Xperience previously. Salesforce is way more robust and intuitive and meets the needs of an enterprise company with enterprise clients way more effectively. I don't think there is another CRM in the market with the overall functionality and usability that can complete with the Salesforce platform for someone in my role.

Incentivized

Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.

I've worked with Salesforce since 2001 in companies ranging from 4 to hundreds of sales people and the system has been able to scale and perhaps more importantly expand (functionally) to the needs of larger organizations. In fact in my previous company, as a provider of a solution that integrated with Salesforce, we had customers that had thousands of sales people using Salesforce.

Incentivized

Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.

• Pipedrive has had an extremely positive impact on our overall business objectives. More specifically, the return on investment has been magnified by the fact that it is fairly inexpensive.
• I can recall 2-3 conversations which prompted my boss and myself to note how convenient Pipedrive is.
• Like most companies, it can often feel like we are spinning many plates at once. Even when our team is not able to connect in person every day, our projects are capable of progressing. Pipedrive has allowed us to press forward where we (normally) would have lacked the communication necessary in doing so.

Incentivized

• It requires a lot of time to manage but does a good job keeping everything in one place
• Managers! Quit having sales professionals create spreadsheets and reports ad hoc. The information is in SFDC. Build a report so you can get it yourself.
• If used properly and not restricted and overmanaged, SFDC will provide huge ROI

Incentivized