I’ve been through this process over the last few weeks, while trying to find an elegant solution to replace the post-it notes and whiteboard scribbles which, until quite recently, represented the extent of our sales organisation. I tested about 30 online apps, starting with Salesforce and working my way through any that offered a free trial.

The vast majority were impressive in some way, but what I wanted was something:

Finally, having almost given up hope of finding something that would genuinely make life easier, I stumbled across Pipedrive. I very nearly ignored it due to the website tagline which reads ‘by salespeople, for salespeople’ and the fact that we don’t employ any salespeople. However, I’m glad I put my doubts aside.

Pipedrive is a Customer Relationship Management system with a sales pipeline built in. It enables you and your team to keep track of your customers, set appointments and see how many deals you have going on at any given time.

So it’s just like any other CRM, I hear you cry! Well, what sets it apart for me – and the reason for this blog post – is not features or integrations (though it has plenty of both) but the fact that you can customise just about everything.

For example, we like simple, so we turned off most of the default fields; but then we wanted to track the source of any new business so we added a drop-down menu to the ‘new deal’ screen which makes it nice and easy to see where a particular lead originated.

Crucially, it also enables you to turn off features that you don’t use. There’s nothing worse than a great app which is cluttered with tabs, checkboxes and even main menu items that you have no need for.

Though my opinion on Pipedrive is probably quite clear by this point, there are a couple of areas where it could be improved.

Pipedrive will connect with gmail and it has a nifty feature whereby emails forwarded to the app are automatically sorted and stored with the relevant contact, but it won’t actively scan your Exchange mailbox in the way that Base CRM does. It’s a relatively minor feature to be lacking, but it would help to remove one more task and make life that little bit easier.

Styling is another potential area for improvement. The default style looks good and works well. However, it’s quite brand-specific and there’s no way to change it. It would be the icing on the cake if it were possible to update the look to fit company branding.

I could go into a lot more depth on individual features such as the iOS app, which is very good and almost worth having without the online app – but for the most part, they’re the same features you’ll find elsewhere, and which of the competing systems works for you will depend on your team and the way that you do things.

I will say that I’m a fan. If you run a small to mid-size team dealing with people and sales, particularly if you’ve struggled to find a CRM system that works for you, I strongly suggest that you sign up for a free trial and give it a go!