In this article, I will share my experiences of deploying the Pipedrive CRM system in a consulting firm of about 10 people when I was just getting started with the CRM. While Pipedrive is simple for a CRM system, there are a few things to keep in mind before you begin deploying it.
The author is currently collaborating commercially with Pipedrive.
What affects the workload involved when deploying Pipedrive?
If you don’t plan to transfer sales data from an old CRM system to Pipedrive, deployment is relatively effortless. Of course, user management, e-mail synchronization, and common practices, among other things, need to be put into place in this case as well. In some cases, it is possible to adjust the settings ‘on the fly,’ which isn’t possible with critical customer data.
In many cases, it is enough to create an account on the Pipedrive website to get started, and no actual deployment project is required. Often, the size of the company or sales team significantly affects the scope of a CRM deployment project. A beginning-stage entrepreneur can start with a clean slate, whereas a larger team has to think about more automation, integration, the data model, and access rights.
Tools for importing data into Pipedrive
I downloaded the data from the old CRM system, edited and combined the data with the purchased customer data, and migrated it to the Pipedrive CRM. Financial figures were a critical part of my customer’s sales process, which is why the data processing required more input than usual.
I mainly used the Power Query add-on for Microsoft Excel to edit the data, but I also tried other sorts of tricks to manipulate it. I edited some of the data with Javascript and regular expressions.
Excel is slow in processing large amounts of data, which turned out to be burdensome, despite there only being thousands of entries. One option would be Python programming language libraries for data processing.
Integration of external systems in Pipedrive deployment
Integrating user accounts, Google Workspace, and the calendar was a breeze. Today, there are significantly more integrations with external applications, and they can be deployed with a few clicks.
Defining terminology again came up when we connected the e-mail system Mailchimp to Pipedrive. Terms such as ‘organization’ or ‘contact person’ should be defined in the same way in Pipedrive and Mailchimp.
Two-way integration between Pipedrive and Mailchimp was not possible, and the integration platform Zapier didn’t help, so a work-around had to be found for transfers between the two systems while waiting for a ready-made integration solution. We decided to import the data from Pipedrive into an Excel file once a month, run an automated macro, and export the processed file to Mailchimp.
Summary of Pipedrive deployment
As we got deeper into the basic functions of Pipedrive, learning them in detail naturally took time. While the system is really simple for the user, it’s the small things that take on weight for the discerning customer during deployment.
Terminology and data modeling played a major role in deployment.
I didn’t find any technical flaws in Pipedrive, and importing data, for example, has been made really easy. Starting a free trial of Pipedrive is risk-free in the sense that your data can be easily taken out of the system and exported to another CRM.
