4 biggest challenges for sales teams and how Pipedrive solves them

More than half of salespeople struggle with capturing more leads.

Source: Pipedrive user research.

There’s a lot of expectation on the sales team to bring in consistent and increasing revenue but the act of closing deals naturally brings a lot of challenges for sales teams.

There’s challenges at every step of the sales funnel, from capturing leads and enriching their data to nurturing and then converting those leads into closed deals.

It’s not a simple process and sales teams need to ensure they’re armed with the right tools to be able to meet expectations (and targets).

Pipedrive is a CRM built specifically for negating these challenges. Whereas other CRMs focus on a wide range of sales, marketing, and customer service functions, Pipedrive has chosen to address and solve the challenges that are specifically facing sales teams.

We’ll explore the 4 biggest challenges for sales teams, explore what Pipedrive is doing to solve these for you, and how you can introduce these solutions into your own workflow to save time, close more deals, and generate more revenue.

Top 4 challenges for sales teams

• Filling the pipeline and capturing leads
• Enriching, researching, and qualifying leads
• Nurturing and warming Leads
• Converting Leads into Sales

Challenge 1: Filling the pipeline and capturing leads

Capturing leads with Pipedrive

As you know, sales is a funnel. Leads enter the funnel, moving through it as they become more aware of your product and begin to show buying intent. Then it’s your job to convert them into a closed deal. Of course, for a lead to enter the funnel, you need to… well… capture the lead…

It’s almost always step 1 of using a CRM. Your CRM is only as good as the data inside of it. So how do you get quality leads into Pipedrive? Well, there are all the traditional ways such as importing lists from files but they also have some clever integrations that make importing leads and maintaining contact information seamless.

• Adding leads to Pipedrive from LinkedIn: For a lot of B2B models, it makes sense to find leads on LinkedIn. It’s the largest professional social network with almost a billion users and its users literally do half the work for you by telling you where they work, their role, and often you can discover their pain points based on the content the create and engage with.

Surfe allows you to add LinkedIn contacts to Pipedrive in one click. Simply visit their LinkedIn profile, hit ‘Add as Contact’, and all of their data is automatically transferred to Pipedrive.

Pipedrive also has some features that are designed specifically to generate inbound leads. This can be through web forms or chat bots but the good thing here is if a user is engaging with a web form or chatbot, you can almost be sure they’re in market for your product or service.

• Web Forms: Pipedrive enables web forms that are fully customizable. You choose where you place it (is it on a feature page, book a demo, or campaign landing page), the information you want to capture (is just a name, company, and email good enough or do you also want to know their biggest pain point?) and the leads are automatically embedded into your CRM. From here, you can enter those leads into automated workflows based on the nature of their engagement.
• Chatbots: If a user visits your website and can’t find the information they’re looking for or has a question, they’ll likely look for a chatbot. Although you’d traditionally think that chatbots would be for customer support, Pipedrive positions them as a useful tool for lead capture. They can be used to gather real-time information on a user’s pain points and then follow up accordingly.

Challenge 2: Enriching leads so you can address their unique concerns

Having qualified leads in your CRM is a good start, but the initial level of information you have about those leads often provides just a surface view. You need to ensure you have the right tools to collect your lead’s contact information as well as insights about their pain points and customer journey.

Here, Pipedrive has you covered.

We already touched on web forms and chatbots that can be used to gather complementary information about your leads, but crucially, you’re going to need their contact information.

Pipedrive is partnered with tools that find the email addresses of your customers with a 95% success rate. It’s all done automatically and the contact information is seamlessly synced into your CRM so that it’s there when you need it.

• Connecting Pipedrive to an intelligent email finder: Pipedrive’s integration with LinkedIn, provided by Surfe, includes direct access to the databases of Apollo, RocketReach, Dropcontact, and Hunter. Those are some of the top email and phone finder tools globally. The reason Surfe’s email finder for Pipedrive users has such a high find rate is because it’s searching multiple databases. 9 in 10 sales teams are using 2+ data enrichment providers. But why hop between several tools when you can use them all in one?
• How it works: When you add a LinkedIn contact to Pipedrive, Surfe automatically runs that contact through the intelligent enrichment cascade. We check their databases one-by-one and if we don’t find the info you’re looking for, we’ll move onto the next database and then the next until we find it. Once we find the relevant contact information, we run it through ZeroBounce to ensure it is valid, and then we add it to your CRM for you.

Discovering the pain points and concerns of your customers

Your leads are all unique individuals with unique pain points and concerns. This means you absolutely need to individually address these concerns with unique messaging every time. And to do that, you need real insight into your customers.

Of course, your working week is already full of high-priority tasks and you haven’t got the time to research each lead individually.

Fortunately, Pipedrive integrates with many third-party insight and buyer intent providers that can automatically enrich your CRM.

Learn more: What Type Of Intent Data Provider Is Best For Your B2B Business?

Challenge 3: Nurturing and warming Leads

Every sales team understands the significance of a well-executed email campaign. High-performing outreach campaigns that nurture and warm leads are multi-touch and multi-channel, with email campaigns playing a crucial role. 

However, a successful email campaign requires more than just an email service provider or adaptable email templates. This is where Pipedrive’s Campaigns feature comes into play.

Campaigns engage your prospects with visually appealing, customizable layouts that address the pain points and concerns of individual prospects. Pipedrive also maintains the prospect’s interest through tracking, analytics, and filtering capabilities ensuring your campaigns perform every time.

Automating personalized email campaigns: Pipedrive’s email integration capabilities send out personalized emails based on specific triggers such as a lead downloading a brochure, attending a webinar, or reaching a specific lead score. But in the era of AI, personalized campaigns mean more than including the lead’s name, company. Combine the power of third-party intent tools with email campaigns to send campaigns that individually address pain points or buyer intent by including details like their last interaction with your business.

Social selling is the new cold call

Okay, maybe not quite. Cold calling remains a crucial weapon for the best sales teams, but social selling seems to be a consistent trend among the best performing sales teams.

Social selling is a strategy that identifies the platforms your potential customers are active on and uses them to interact and engage. As a strategy, it has proven to be incredibly powerful. Social is a much more natural place to build relationships with your customers than cold calls, emails, ads, and most other traditional channels. If it’s not already a part of your sales strategy, it should be – and Pipedrive can help you implement it with almost no effort.

• Social selling with Pipedrive: We already discussed how once you identify a potential customer on LinkedIn, you can add them to Pipedrive and find their email address with Surfe. But then, you can also reach out to them using personalized message templates provided by the Pipedrive LinkedIn integration by Surfe. Surfe then tracks the response rate of each of your templates so you know which is performing best and can optimize.
• Sync relationships with Pipedrive automatically: You can sync your LinkedIn messages to Pipedrive to keep track of relationships. You’ll never lose track of where you’re up to with a contact and your whole team can be informed about deals as the grow and adapt without you having to edit or manage deals manually.

Challenge 4: Converting Leads into Sales

We spoke right at the start about how sales is a funnel. Well, if you apply these strategies and use Pipedrive, your leads will arrive at this final stage of the funnel: conversion.

Closing a deal is the culmination of the lead management process. Using Pipedrive, you can enhance your closing techniques by leveraging insights from the lead’s behavior and interaction history:

• Tailored proposals: Generate customized proposals based on the information gathered during the nurturing process. Use Pipedrive to track which features or products the lead showed interest in, and highlight these in your closing discussions.
• Effective follow-ups: Follow-ups are critical in addressing any last-minute concerns and reinforcing the value of your offering. Sales aren’t going to carry themselves over the finish line. Use Pipedrive to set up reminders or automate follow-ups to ensure no deal gets neglected at the most crucial moment.

Using Analytics to Improve Sales Strategies

Pipedrive’s analytics capabilities allow you to extract valuable insights from your sales activities, which can be used to refine and enhance your sales strategies:

• Performance analysis: Review your sales performance metrics within Pipedrive to identify trends and patterns in successful deals. Look for common factors among won deals, such as lead source, interaction frequency, or particular stages that had high conversion rates.
• A/B testing: Test different sales tactics, such as varying the content of your emails or the timing of your calls, and use Pipedrive’s reporting tools to measure which tactics perform best.
• Continuous improvement: Use the data from Pipedrive to continuously refine your sales processes. Implement changes based on empirical evidence of what works, ensuring that your sales strategies are always evolving and improving.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

Because of Pipedrive’s focus on sales, it’s the best CRM option for teams to confront the biggest challenges  that are usually faced by sales teams. From capturing leads through multiple channels and enriching their data with valuable insights, to nurturing them with personalized campaigns and social selling tools, Pipedrive equips salespeople with everything they need to convert leads into sales. Additionally, connecting Pipedrive to LinkedIn with a tool like Surfe allows you to take your sales to save time while keeping your CRM clean – meaning the automated parts of your week are automated while you focus on selling and closing deals.

FAQs about Lead Gen and Pipedrive

What is Pipedrive used for?

Pipedrive is a sales pipeline CRM designed to help small businesses manage leads, track sales activities and close more deals. You can use it to streamline processes and consolidate sales data in one unified CRM sales tool, which helps you keep track of leads more effectively. 

Is Pipedrive right for my business?

Every business has different needs, and every CRM offers different tools and functionalities. If you’re a small business, or you’re looking for a flexible system, Pipedrive might be a good fit for you. Work out exactly what you need from a CRM system, and then compare those needs to what Pipedrive offers. 

Can Pipedrive generate leads?

LeadBooster is Pipedrive’s powerful and easy to use lead generation tool. It can help you qualify your leads, so you have a far better chance of them converting into a customer.