Pipedrive is a fantastic tool to help monitor and track lead generation and referral sources. It helps maintain accountability with the sales team and helps ensure that we are doing appropriate marketing to maintain a steady influx of cases. The weekly and quarterly sales reports that it can generate are incredibly helpful and insightful. They help inform us of what we need to focus on each quarter/year.
Microsoft SQL is ubiquitous, while MySQL runs under the hood all over the place. Microsoft SQL is the platform taught in colleges and certification courses and is the one most likely to be used by businesses because it is backed by Microsoft. Its interface is friendly (well, as pleasant as SQL can be) and has been used by so many for so long that resources are freely available if you encounter any issues.
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
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.
Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise edition has a high cost but is the only edition which supports SQL Always On Availability Groups. It would be nice to include this feature in the Standard version.
Licensing of Microsoft SQL Server is a quite complex matter, it would be good to simplify licensing in the future. For example, per core vs per user CAL licensing, as well as complex licensing scenarios in the Cloud and on Edge locations.
It would be good to include native tools for converting Oracle, DB2, Postgresql and MySQL/MariaDB databases (schema and data) for import into Microsoft SQL Server.
We understand that the Microsoft SQL Server will continue to advance, offering the same robust and reliable platform while adding new features that enable us, as a software center, to create a superior product. That provides excellent performance while reducing the hardware requirements and the total cost of ownership of our solution.
Pipedrive is easy to use and has a clean interface so we can follow up accurately. Its custom features help manage leads and evaluate team performance. It saves time and improves efficiency. Pipedrive is stable and supports integrations and automation.
SQL Server mostly 'just works' or generates error messages to help you sort out the trouble. You can usually count on the product to get the job done and keep an eye on your potential mistakes. Interaction with other Microsoft products makes operating as a Windows user pretty straight forward. Digging through the multitude of dialogs and wizards can be a pain, but the answer is usually there somewhere.
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.
We managed to handle most of our problems by looking into Microsoft's official documentation that has everything explained and almost every function has an example that illustrates in detail how a particular functionality works. Just like PowerShell has the ability to show you an example of how some cmdlet works, that is the case also here, and in my opinion, it is a very good practice and I like it.
Other than SQL taking quite a bit of time to actually install there are no problems with installation. Even on hardware that has good performance SQL can still take close to an hour to install a typical server with management and reporting services.
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.
[Microsoft] SQL Server has a much better community and professional support and is overall just a more reliable system with Microsoft behind it. I've used MySQL in the past and SQL Server has just become more comfortable for me and is my go to RDBMS.
Great on setup which made our work easier and less technically equipped people can manage a lot of things(compared to SalesForce where you need to hire a developer to set it up)
We were able to integrate our calling system easily and get things going on the lead calling aspect.
Great multipipeline option where we were able to manage both organisations under one roof.
Increased accuracy - We went from multiple users having different versions of an Excel spreadsheet to a single source of truth for our reporting.
Increased Efficiency - We can now generate reports at any time from a single source rather than multiple users spending their time collating data and generating reports.
Improved Security - Enterprise level security on a dedicated server rather than financial files on multiple laptop hard drives.
