I’m trying out this service called PipeDrive. The idea is that you put your leads in and the leads progress through stages until you “win” the deal. It’s basically Kanban for sales leads.
It’s cool, but I don’t really sell like that. After I “win” the deal…I have a customer, who needs support, care, and attention. At that point, I could add customers into a CRM, but if I had a good CRM I wouldn’t need PipeDrive. So I’m left trying to figure out how to use Pipedrive as a sale pipeline tool, as well as a CRM.
The one feature it has that I really love is that every time you complete an activity, it’s like “okay what’s next?” If there is a “deal” without a next step, it flags it for attention.
I also really like how I can create a task to email/call/follow up with someone and include notes about what I’m supposed to be following up on. In my email inbox I can “snooze” an email until such and such date, but when it comes back 30 days later I don’t always remember why.
Oh, this might be PERFECT! I just found is that you can create an activity/task, then create a new contact directly from the task. You can then view contacts along with task and note history which is very CRM-like and SO COOL!!
So I can enter my customers/contacts into PipeDrive and use it to keep notes and manage follow up reminders. When one of those contacts shows interest in making a purchase THEN I create a deal. That makes way more sense.
Hmm. We’ll see. This might be a really helpful tool!