Monday.com Vs. Pipedrive 2023: Best CRM for Small Business?

Pipeline management is easily one of Pipedrive’s strongest features, helping businesses visualize and streamline their sales process. 

With Pipedrive’s customizable pipeline view, you can easily track deals as they move through each stage of your sales process.

Here are a few key features of Pipedrive’s pipeline management:

• Customizable stages: Pipedrive allows you to customize your pipeline stages according to your specific sales process. This allows for better organization and a more accurate representation of your sales cycle.
• Timeline view: The timeline view offered by Pipedrive is incredibly helpful in showing the status of deals at each stage, making it easy to see where they are in the sales process.
• Activity tracking: Another impressive feature is Pipedrive’s ability to track activities, such as calls, emails, and meetings. This gives you a better understanding of your team’s sales efforts and helps to identify areas for improvement.

To test this feature out, we added some of our affiliate marketing deals at SBB. 

Here’s how a new deal card looked (to give you a better idea).

Within each card, we were able to easily add the following information:

• Contact
• Organization
• Title
• Value
• Pipeline stage
• Close date
• Probability

Once our deals were put in, we could easily drag and drop them to the appropriate stage in our pipeline (shown below). 

We especially liked the ability to easily click on each deal card and schedule an activity (directly from the pipeline). 

For example, we scheduled a follow-up meeting with our Amazon contact (pictured below).

The whole process took less than a minute, and our team could easily see any updates or changes in real time. 

Our takeaway: Pipedrive’s pipeline management features are highly customizable, easy to use, and give a clear overview of our sales process. 

The activity tracking feature also provided valuable insights into our team’s efforts.

When it comes to project management, Pipedrive delivers the goods. 

For an additional $8/month, Pipedrive offers powerful project management platforms capable of handling multiple projects simultaneously.

Here are a few of the key features we found while testing Pipedrive’s project management capabilities:

• Multiple project views: With Pipedrive, you can view your projects in either list or board mode, depending on your preference. This allows for more flexibility and customization to suit your team’s needs.
• Task assignment and tracking: Pipedrive’s project management feature allows you to assign tasks to specific team members and track their progress in real time. This helps keep everyone on the same page and ensures timely completion of tasks.
• Customizable project templates: Pipedrive also offers the ability to create customizable project templates, saving significant time when starting new projects. You can also add subtasks and deadlines within each template, making project planning much more efficient.

Here’s a quick look at the project template customization screen. 

With this feature, my team and I saved tons of time and effort when setting up new projects at Small Business Bonfire. 

Once we had our templates in place, we could easily add new projects (pictured below).

Within each new project card, we could easily edit the following information:

• Title
• Phase
• Owner 
• Associated deals
• Start & end date
• Associated project template
• Associated contacts & organizations

With Pipedrive, we had a bird’s eye view of all our ongoing projects, making it easy to keep track of progress and make necessary adjustments.

Our verdict: Pipedrive’s project management capabilities are comprehensive, efficient, and highly customizable, making it an excellent choice for small businesses looking to streamline their project management processes.

Pipedrive provides some fantastic workflow automation capabilities for SMBs to take advantage of. 

Great automation can reduce the repetitive tasks in your sales process, allowing your team to focus on what matters—closing more sales and building customer relationships. 

Here are some notable features of Pipedrive’s workflow automation:

• Notifications: Pipedrive’s automation features include customizable notifications, ensuring that your team never misses important actions or deadlines. You can set up specific triggers to send notifications for a wide range of events, such as a deal moving to a new stage or a task nearing its due date, keeping everyone informed and up-to-date.
• Progress bar: The progress bar is a handy feature that visually represents how far you are in your sales or project process. It automatically updates based on completing actions or stages in your workflow, providing a real-time overview of your progress.
• Custom workflows: Another notable feature is the ability to create custom workflows tailored to your team’s specific sales process. This feature automates various actions, such as sending emails, creating activities, and updating deal details based on certain triggers (reducing manual work and enhancing efficiency).

We took full advantage of Pipedrive’s workflow automation features throughout our six months of testing. 

We set up custom workflows for different stages in our sales process, such as sending a follow-up email to an affiliate marketing client or creating a reminder to schedule a call with a potential partner.

Not only did this save us time and effort, but it also helped us stay organized and on top of our game.

Pipedrive offers fantastic campaign creation capabilities for an extra $16/month.

With Pipedrive, you can easily accomplish the following: 

• Create and manage email campaigns
• Track campaign performance and metrics
• Schedule and send emails
• Segment contacts based on specific criteria
• Personalize emails with merge tags

Throughout our six months of testing, we found Pipedrive’s campaign features user-friendly and efficient in managing our email marketing efforts. 

Let’s walk you through how it went for me and my team. 

For starters, we could choose from various helpful campaign templates (shown below).

These templates make it easy to create professional-looking emails (without any design or coding experience). 

Once we selected our template, we could edit the content and easily add the following to each email:

• Text
• Images
• Buttons
• Social links
• Video
• Custom code 

We loved the drag-and-drop interface (pictured below) that allowed us to customize each email in less than 5 minutes. 

We also appreciated Pipedrive’s ability to track important metrics, such as:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Unsubscribe rates

This allowed us to see which campaigns were most effective and make necessary improvements for future campaigns.

Overall, Pipedrive offers some great campaign management tools. The only downside here is that it makes Pipedrive even more expensive per month. 

Managing your contacts is essential for any business, and Pipedrive excels in this regard. 

What’s great about Pipedrive’s contact management is that it’s simultaneously extremely easy to use and very powerful. 

To test this feature, my team and I added some of SBB’s affiliate marketing B2B contacts. 

Here’s how the “new contact” card looked every time we added one. 

Within each card, we were able to easily add and edit the following:

• Name
• Organization
• Label
• Contact info
• Status
• Custom fields

Pipedrive is great for SMBs that want to be able to manage a ton of contacts with ease.

It offers all the firepower and none of the headaches regarding contact management.

Pipedrive’s activity-tracking capabilities help keep your team organized and on top of their daily tasks. 

It’s like having your own personal assistant, reminding you of scheduled tasks, meetings, and follow-ups.

Let’s dive into some key features of this tool:

• Task management: With the Activity Tracker, you can easily assign tasks to team members, set deadlines, and keep track of their progress. This ensures everyone is accountable and stays on the right track.
• Reminders: Say goodbye to missed deadlines or important meetings! The Activity Tracker allows you to set reminders for your tasks (so you’re always prepared and on time).
• Integration with calendar: Seamlessly sync your scheduled tasks and meetings with your calendar using Pipedrive’s Activity Tracker. This makes it super convenient to plan your day and stay organized.
• Task prioritization: Prioritize your tasks based on their urgency and importance. This lets you focus on what matters and manage your time effectively.

Let me give you an example: We recently used the Activity Tracker to schedule a negotiation meeting with one of our clients via Zoom. 

It took us less than 5 minutes to do the following:

• Set up the meeting
• Assign it to a team member
• Send out a calendar invite

Here’s a quick look at the process. 

With Pipedrive, we could set an automatic reminder for the meeting, ensuring no one missed it. 

This feature increased our efficiency and improved our scheduling capabilities across the board.

Our two cents: This feature makes Pipedrive a no-brainer for SMBs looking to get organized and stay on top of their tasks while scaling. 

Pipedrive further demonstrates its commitment to enhancing the sales process with its LeadBooster feature. 

At an additional cost of $39/month, LeadBooster is a powerful tool that simplifies finding and converting potential leads. 

We found its price to be well justified by the value it provides. 

Here’s what LeadBooster brings to the table:

• Chatbots and live chat: Pipedrive’s chatbots and live chat functions ensure you’re always available to interact with prospective clients. The AI-powered chatbots can handle initial inquiries, qualify leads, and even schedule appointments, freeing up your team’s time for more complex tasks.
• Web forms: Pipedrive allows you to customize and embed lead capture forms on your website with this feature. Any information collected from these forms is automatically added to your Pipedrive CRM, making lead capture and management a seamless process.
• Prospector: The prospector tool helps you discover new leads through machine learning algorithms. It identifies high-potential leads based on your previous sales data, allowing you to focus your efforts on the most promising prospects.

In our experience, LeadBooster was instrumental in helping us streamline our lead-generation process, enabling us to connect with potential clients more effectively.

It’s perfect for sales representatives who want to take their lead-generation efforts to the next level.