Pipedrive Review: Is This the Best CRM for Realtors?

What is Pipedrive?

Pipedrive is a lightweight CRM for salespeople who want to avoid drowning in data when organizing everyday activities. 

The app simplifies and automates most tasks sales reps engage in when guiding customers through the sales cycle.

It also has a built-in project management tool.

Now, we'll get into the features of Pipedrive in a minute.

But the basic gist is that Pipedrive arms realtors with all the tools they need to analyze, qualify, and nurture potential buyers till they turn to clients. 

The CRM monitors and provides actionable insights into each prospect or client interaction so you can help them make informed decisions throughout the sales process. 

Overall, Pipedrive is laser-focused on assisting salespeople in managing their contacts and sales pipeline at a price that's hard to beat. 

With that, let's get into actual features.

Pipedrive Review: Pros & Cons 

Pros

Cons 

Is Pipedrive Right for You?

We recommend Pipedrive for:

• Small but ambitious sales team 
• Budget-conscious salespeople
• Non-tech-savvy realtors
• Agencies in search of an easy-to-set-up CRM 
• SMBs across industries 

Not recommended for: 

• Fortune 500 companies 
• Marketing teams 
• Startups in search of a free plan 

Deal & Lead Management

Deal management is Pipedrive's main feature.

It's basically where you sort prospects into different pipelines and stages. So you can gain a clear view of their journey through the sales process.

Apart from Pipedrive’s deal management interface being clutter-free and easy to set up, users can also drag and drop the Kanban boards across pipelines. 

We’ve seen a lot of features you’ll find on Pipedrive in other CRM tools we reviewed. 

But unlike most other CRM, Pipedrive brings more awareness to the sales process. And provides some features we haven’t seen before. 

For example, they allow you to define rotten periods for your pipeline stages. 

Add color-coded labels to each deal.

And when necessary, allow you to convert deals back to leads.

Talking of leads, Pipedrive also offers a lead management hub you can use to give prospects the proper care and attention they need to become paying customers.

The hub comes with interesting lead generation features like the lead inbox, chatbots, live chat, prospector, etc. 

But are they all useful right out of the box? 

We are not %100 convinced. Here’s what we mean:

To begin with, we give kudos to the lead inbox. 

Like a centralized database, the lead inbox houses prospects’ files in one location, providing all the unique data realtors need to nurture and qualify leads.

You can use it to keep notes, schedule phone calls, set meetings, indicate deadlines, or create actionable tasks that can turn leads into clients. 

The Lead management hub also highlights tools like:

• Chatbot to engage with website visitors and answer routing questions 24/7
• Live chat to add a human touch to your Chatbot conversations
• Easy-to-share web forms to capture lead data
• Prospector to find leads from a database of over 400 million profiles

But the issue is these tools don’t add up as a comprehensive part of the lead management hub. They exist as a part of the LeadBooster add-on software.

That means subscribing to a regular Pipedrive plan doesn't grant automatic access to these features. 

If you want to use the Chatbot, Live Chat, or any other lead generation feature (excluding the lead inbox), you’ve to pay an extra $39 a month.

Overall, we think Pipedrive’s deal and lead management hubs are pretty cool for startups and established real estate agents. 

They have a lot of unique features. Most of which are helpful.

But they should stop hiding some basic lead management features behind extra paywalls. That way, they can help budget-conscious realtors get more value for their money. 

Automation

Pipedrives' automation hub helps you eliminate repetitive and time-consuming tasks like manual data entry or bulk email sending.

Specifically, it sets up flow and triggers workflows so that realtors can automate any step of their sales process.

The automation hub also supports integration with Slack and other project management tools, keeping everyone updated across apps.  

Luckily, right off the bat, we found something we really liked: 

The automation hub uses an AI sales assistant to comb through users' data, suggesting the perfect next step to automate. 

Why is this a big deal? 

When automating workflows, most CRM platforms leave users in their pool of thoughts. 

Salespeople always ask: “How do we get leads from point A to point B? What’s the crucial next step to automate?”

We like that Pipedrive sales AI does a bit of hand-holding each time such questions arise. 

It offers performance-based tips on how to improve productivity, notifications about key metrics to track, and the activity a sales rep should tackle next.

Other than that, the automation hub is pretty straightforward.

You choose the step you want to automate. The tool gives you a list of actions to select from, plus workflows to trigger each time the action is met. 

We enjoyed the premade templates but weren't as successful in building personalized sequences from scratch. 

After using these features, we can't say Pipedrive's automation hub is the best in class, but it gets the job done.

Realtors with little to no technical skills or coding knowledge can easily create workflows and automate everyday tasks. 

But be mindful. Pipedrive is not built to scale with large teams. The automation options are pretty limited compared to close competitors like HubSpot. 

Communication Tracking 

Next up, we wanted to know if the CRM can simplify how users track communication with prospects and customers.

So, we checked out Pipedrive’s contact hub. 

This works pretty much like any contact management tool on the market. 

Click on the contact icon to get a bird-eye view of all your leads, deals, projects, and everything in between. 

Along with options to group contacts with filters. 

But how’s this hub overall? 

On the plus side, the contact hub has an easy-to-find and use ‘Follow-up Frequency’ feature. 

Toggling the pencil icon basically allows you to customize how often you want to reach out to specific contacts. 

So you always have a clear view of who needs to be contacted next and when. 

For example, let’s say you would like to contact your marketing contacts once a week. Just switch on the ‘Follow-up Frequency’ option and set it to ‘Weekly.’ All the marketers you haven’t contacted within the last week will be highlighted in red and shuffled to the top of the list.

Why is this useful? 

With a large list of leads and customers, it's sometimes tricky to know when to follow up and when not to. The data can be overwhelming. 

Setting a ‘follow-up Frequency’ is a clever way to simplify key stages of each contact’s journey so you never miss a beat. 

Unfortunately, Pipedrive doesn't support team inboxes. 

You can't use an info@... email to schedule frequency follow-ups or reply to inquiries anonymously. 

This is a huge pain for real estate agencies with multiple sales reps because everyone will have to use their own email addresses to schedule follow-ups. 

And team members won't be able to tend to other team members' deals.

That said, we think Pipedrives' communication tracking tools are on point. 

We found the smart contact data for retrieving contact information from Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn a joy to use. Plus, the frequency follow-up feature is perfect for keeping leads warm. 

However, Pipedrive can be more fleshed out. Specifically, the lack of a team inbox can be a serious deal breaker for established brands. 

Insight & Reports 

Finally, let's see how well Pipedrive helps realtors stay on top of their performance data.

Pipedrive insight hub bubbles up clear and attractive charts that show, at a glance, sales activities and organization-wide goals. 

There are three sections to the insight hub: dashboard, goals, and reports. 

• The Dashboard showcases all the customized reports added from your report section. 
• The Goal feature helps you keep track of your deal and activity progress. 
• The Report section allows you to create a visual representation of your sales performance. 

If you decide to use Pipedrive, you’ll probably find yourself customizing your dashboard with its custom reports sheets often. 

That’s because the drag-and-drop pre-report templates highlight almost every metric realtors need to keep their pipeline active. 

Again, these are features many other paid CRMs have. So they are definitely not unique to Pipedrive. 

What’s new is the simplistic and easy-to-access data format. 

We didn't have to scour through long videos or lengthy tutorials to understand how the insight hub works. Everything felt intuitive right out of the box. 

And even the color scheme makes sense. There's a great contrast between positive and negative information, so you can always quickly see how things stand while on a call.

On the downside, access and customization vary across plans. 

For example, essential plan users can add only 25 reports to a dashboard, and only professional and enterprise users can create extra dashboards or use deal custom fields when building reports.

In our opinion, Pipedrive’s insight hub is, overall, more affordable. And the data is slightly easier to digest than any other CRM tool on the market. 

Pipedrive Pricing 

Here’s a breakdown of Pipedrive’s pricing structure.

In summary, unfortunately, Pipedrive does not offer an entirely free plan. At best, new users get a 14-day free trial. 

And while the software is reasonably priced, lower-tier plans are limited. If you’re not willing to pay for high-tier package, you might not enjoy the CRM as much. 

Why is Pipedrive the Best CRM for Realtors?

Well, before we dive into the many reasons real estate agents might value Pipedrive over any other sales software, please note that Pipedrive is not an exclusive CRM for realtors; SMBs from all walks of life can use the tool.

With that in mind, Pipedrive tops our list of CRMs for realtors because it brings a disciplined, activities-based approach to the sales pipeline.

For the most part, it doesn’t require much technicality to set up. 

Plus, the host of sales-based features available made it easy for us to double down on our lead generation activities as we qualified, nurtured, and analyzed potential clients. 

Apart from the Pipedrive features we reviewed above, here are some other powerful inclusions realtors will find helpful: 

• The customized drip campaign hub can help realtors be in more places at once. 
• A project management hub to help organize, plan, and schedule tasks. 
• API access across plans to assist tech-savvy realtors in creating custom integrations. 
• Lead qualification feature to know when a lead is hot, warm, or cold. 
• A sales Inbox to send emails directly from Pipedrive while automatically linking them to related deals and contacts.
• And the phone call and meeting tracking feature for agents who want to stay on top of everything that has happened with clients. 

Getting Started With Pipedrive 

If there's one thing we value Pipedrive for, it's that realtors can get started on the platform (almost) instantly. 

The sign-up process is straightforward. And with the descriptive walkthroughs spread around the platform, you need not worry about a learning curve.

Plus, there are hundreds of online tutorials to help new users hit the ground running.  

And for enthusiastic realtors looking to pursue their first deal on Pipedrive, here’s an overview of the deal creation process. 

1. Go to the deal’s hub by clicking on the “$” icon on the left side of the navigation pane, then click on the “+ Deal” button. 

2. You’ll be prompted with a pop-up window asking for basic information such as contact name, organization name, deal title, pipeline stage, email, phone number, etc. 

3. After filling in the necessary information, you’ll be redirected to a page where you can take action on the deal.  You can schedule phone calls, take notes, send emails, save documents, and move prospects across deal stages. 

And that’s it! Setting up a deal, as well as carrying out a variety of other tasks on Pipedrive, is relatively easy. 

Conclusion

Pipedrive isn’t a lofty or complex enterprise customer relationship management software. 

As much as it can cater to the in-depth CRM needs of startups and established brands, it doesn’t come with the bells and whistles needed to run a Fortune 500 company. 

That said, we think Pipedrive is one of the best CRMs for small and established realtors looking to manage their sales pipeline and close more deals faster. 

Pipedrive Alternatives

If you’re looking for more complex and robust CRM solutions, here are a few Pipeline alternatives worth exploring.

Pipedrive Vs. Salesforce 

Like Pipedrive, Salesforce is a sales-focused CRM known to help build bridges between companies and customers.

The major difference between Salesforce and Pipedrive is that while Pipedrive is lauded for being more straightforward and cost-effective, Salesforce offers comprehensive features and is pricey.

Pipedrive Vs. HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM offering dedicated tools for sales, marketing, CMS, service, and operations teams.

Pipedrive, with its sales-centered approach, offers pipeline customization at a cost-effective rate. On the other hand, HubSpot offers more comprehensive CRM solutions, aligning sales and marketing efforts with an array of digital tools. 

Pipedrive Vs. Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is an online sales platform encouraging super-fast work and steadfast growth. 

On a comparative scale, the Pipedrive CRM platform, with its user-friendly engagement tools, excels in sales-focused tasks, while Zoho CRM provides a comprehensive suite with more customization options and broader app integrations.

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