Want to set up and scale a killer sales team? Follow Pipedrive’s exemple!

Aircall
Aircall  —  RockTheTelcos
4 min readMay 31, 2016

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Daniel Galvin Pipedrive’s Head of Sales and Support reveals some behind-the-scenes strategies the company used in order to successfully organize and scale the sales team.

Originally appeared on Aircall blog

Pipedrive famously managed to grow the business to 30,000+ paying customers, serviced by a team of more than 160 people spread across Tallinn and one office in New York. All this without having a dedicated sales team from day one, but rather heavily focusing on product development and marketing.

Creating a sales team from scratch

The need for a sales team arrived when Pipedrive realized that there was an entire segment of potential clients that didn’t upgrade at the end of the 30-day trial period. These potential customers actually didn’t know what to do or how to use the product after signing up, didn’t talk to anybody and finally gave up pretty quickly.

As Daniel puts it:

“As a company, we decided we needed a sales team to inform people during the 30-day trial how to use the product and to point them in the right direction in order for them to take fully advantage of it, with the original hypothesis that a passive sales model — giving information instead of hardcore selling would increase our conversion rates.”

The team decided to act on this huge growth opportunity: the sales team was created. It answered a very well-defined need: help onboard the “lost-in-translation” clients.

It’s all about the ROI

Pipedrive sells in over 140 countries but knew they needed support in some areas with the sales team: in the US — one of largest markets, Europe — their historical base, and Latin America (Brazil especially) — where they experienced good organic growth.

The goal of the sales team is to be consultative, with a focus on a real quick sales process. In other words provide information in order to convert at a higher rate.

Yet based on the price point — 12$ or 9€/month — the company knew that an hour-long demo with a lot of follow-ups was not doable. The return on the investment was going to be too low. Moreover, there wasn’t any guarantee that anybody who signed up was going to eventually stick around. The growth strategy was all about the ROI.

As Daniel explains:

“Not a high-touch volume on every lead but “a” touch so to speak.”

Wait, but how did they do it?

Generally speaking, Pipedrive’s clients fall into 2 categories:

  • they have used a CRM in the past
  • have not — small businesses

People in the first category usually have strong expectations from a CRM which the company needed to understand in a detailed way.

People in the second category are the segment who need education in order to take advantage of the most valuable features Pipedrive has to offer.

Yet, these clients were the ones who didn’t spontaneously interact with anybody. The team needed a way to reach them, so they decided to simply call potential clients, using Aircall.

“We call them, knowing that some people will want to talk to us, others won’t. But we make the situation very informative so that they could feel comfortable with the product.”

How Pipedrive actually uses Aircall

Aircall is the second tool (after Pipedrive) that the sales teams uses heavily. Aircall’s direct integration with Pipedrive comes in handy at this point and makes the set-up, monitoring and follow-up piece of cake.

As every fast-paced team, the sales people needed an easy-to-onboard product they could start using right away. They also needed something that would quickly bring value to the table.

As Aircall is pretty intuitive and self-explanatory there was no need for training nor education, and the team begun being operational early on. This was a big plus business-side.

Daniel explains:

“That was key to us because we needed people to make calls right away. Within the first few days everybody settled in on how to use Aircall and how to look at their own numbers to see their performance”

Due to the advanced analytics Aircall provides the team is easily tracking key metrics. This helps improve the overall strategy as sales team members know in a glance what metrics are doing well or not, what needs optimization, etc.

From a cost point of vue Aircall fits well with Pipedrive’s actual model. As the sales teams is fairly recent, the company needed the flexibility Aircall provides in order to iterate, install one program and use it, without dedicated time on training or unnecessary back-and-forth with support people.

And Daniel happily states:

“From a training and feedback point of vue we only have to install one tool. No need to train people on multiple platforms. The feedback on the product is great so far.”

Originally appeared on Aircall Blog

Written with ️❤ by Miruna Mitranescu Content Marketing at Aircall

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