Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
As businesses grow and expand, so does the need for tools that help with managing processes. For sales teams, there is nothing more critical than having the right CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool, whether you're a small business or running enterprise sales teams. Hence it's vital to get savvy on your software options as a CRM is so essential to helping with contact management, sales pipeline management, and building relationships with your customers.
In this clash of the Titans, we'll be comparing two popular CRM tool options: Pipedrive vs Salesmate. We'll examine them both based on advanced features such as workflow management, integrations, email marketing, enrichment, collaboration, ease of use, as well as pricing, and more.
What exactly is a CRM tool?
Customer Relationship Management software, or CRM, is software used for (as the name suggests) managing relationships with your customers. Not only is it useful in letting you track deals, interactions, and customer contact details, but it can help you analyse your customer data as a whole. This is especially useful if you're interested in things like marketing automation, improving your overall sales processes and sales pipeline, and even anticipating customer needs.
In the past, a CRM was often associated with sales, from helping with lead generation and lead scoring, to closing deals and building customer relationships. However, companies have now caught on to the usefulness of Customer Relationship Management for all areas of business, not just sales, whether for marketing teams, recruiting, PR, partnerships, and more. Recent years have even seen an explosion in the popularity of Personal CRMs, for managing our private as well as personal relationships.
Let's take a closer look at two in this comparison of Pipedrive vs Salesmate and introduce folk to help you make a decision.
Pipedrive vs Salesmate comparison
Pipedrive is a cloud-based CRM designed to help sales teams close more deals.
It focuses on visibility, productivity, and automation in sales pipeline management. The platform provides features such as a visual pipeline, automated follow-ups, call recording, contact info updates, advanced analytics & reporting, and email marketing. Additionally, Pipedrive has integrations with popular tools like Slack, Zapier, Google Calendar, and MailChimp for campaigns automation and much more.
Salesmate is an easy-to-use CRM that focuses more on small businesses and sales teams as its primary customer base.
It helps build relationships with customers through contact management, deal tracking and nurturing leads through automated workflows. Its suite of features includes lead capture forms, calendars & reminders, quota tracking & forecasting, custom reports & insights analysis as well as integration with other business apps like MailChimp and Slack.
Contact Management
Your contacts are the backbone of your CRM system, and as a fundamental starting point to sales processes, any CRM needs to let you organize your contacts in a way that's efficient and clear. For sales teams that means clear segmentation of contacts, tagging, and being able to add any additional data with ease.
Pipedrive and Salesmate are neck-and-neck in this category. Both platforms offer excellent contact management features with options such as contact segmentation, tag management, and custom field management. However, Pipedrive offers a slight edge with its ability to automatically sync contacts from over 30 sources including Gmail, and other services.
Integrations
CRM software should work seamlessly with the rest of your tech stack. Most CRMs offer hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations, but in this comparison, we want to focus on advanced integrations that can help you get more out of your CRM.
Pipedrive offers over 400 integrations with several tools, including options for payment processing (Stripe), accounting (Xero), email marketing (MailChimp) and much more via Zapier and PieSync.
Salesmate, on the other hand, offers more than 700 integrations with popular apps like Mailchimp, Google Calendar and Slack. Like Pipedrive, Salesmate can connect to Zapier, from which you can connect hundreds of apps through custom "Zaps".
Pipeline Management
Another essential element to a CRM, Pipedrive and Salesmate both provide powerful features to help users manage their sales pipeline. You can create custom stages, manage activity information for each contact, and track progress in real-time.
Pipedrive offers an edge here with its visual drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy to move leads through the sales process, or easily drag and drop deals into customized stages and create custom workflows for each stage. It also offers powerful reporting tools so that you can review performance and identify opportunities for improvement.
Salesmate's pipeline management features are more manual, but it does offer advanced search functionality so you can quickly locate contacts within your database. Salesmate's pipeline management feature allows users to define different steps in the sales process, set up conditional automation rules, and design customized reports on performance.
However, Pipedrive takes it one step further with its AI-powered sales assistant that offers insights into the best next action based on data from the CRM. This helps sales reps focus their efforts on high-value opportunities and close more deals faster.
Automation
CRMs should automate tedious tasks and free up your sales team to focus on more important activities. Both Pipedrive and Salesmate offer several robust automation features.
Pipedrive has built-in automation capabilities, such as automated email follow-up sequences, customizable filters, and conditions that can be used to automatically assign tasks or set reminders when a certain condition is met. It also supports Zapier so you can create custom automations using hundreds of third-party apps.
Salesmate offers similar features with its “Touchpoints” feature, which allows users to define an event that will trigger an automated action (such as sending an email or setting a reminder). It also comes with predefined triggers such as "opportunity created", "lead contacted" and "task assigned".
Mail Merge
Mail merge is essential for email marketing, and sending personalized emails to customers. It's a great way to save time and build stronger relationships. Both Salesmate and Pipedrive offer email campaigns with mail merge capabilities, but again, Pipedrive takes the cake in this case – it offers powerful templates that can be used to create automated emails with ease.
However, Salesmate has more customization options. Users can personalize email templates with recipient-specific tags, making them more personal and engaging.
Enrichment
Customer data enrichment is another important feature of any good CRM software. This enables you to enrich your contacts’ information with additional data such as social media profiles, job titles, contact histories, and more.
Both Pipedrive and Salesmate offer enrichment features where users can gather information such as social profiles and other contacts associated with a specific company.
Collaboration
If collaboration is essential to your business (and let's face it, there's no team management without collaboration), Salesmate is the best CRM system for you. It offers excellent team collaboration features such as team chat, in-app calling, and team task management.
Pipedrive also has good collaboration features, including team chat and task management, but they’re not as comprehensive as Salesmate.
Reporting
Good reporting is essential for any sales organization and all of these CRMs offer a variety of reports to help you analyze your performance. Salesmate offers an impressive range of customizable reports and charts that can be used to track key metrics such as conversion rates, average deal size, number of leads generated, etc.
Pipedrive also provides detailed reporting capabilities where users can create custom dashboards and reports based on different data points. The system even allows users to share reports with others.
Customer Support
All three of these CRMs offer excellent customer support options such as email, phone, and live chat. Salesmate has the most extensive help center with FAQs, tutorials, and webinars for users to access.
Pipedrive also provides good customer support with a knowledgeable team that can assist users with any issues they may have, though the highest and most personal level of support (phone support) is available only for those on the highest-priced Enterprise plan.
Ease of Use
Both Pipedrive and Salesmate offer an easy-to-navigate user interface designed to ensure users have an easy time using the system. Pipedrive, however, has a slight edge with its quick add features, which allow users to add leads or deals quickly from anywhere they are within the system.
Pricing
For both Pipedrive and Salesmate, there are various pricing options depending on the plan you choose, and both have a two-week free trial for you to test out the platform before paying.
Salesmate starts as the most affordable, with a basic plan starting at just $12 per user, per month. Pipedrive isn't far behind, with a starter plan from $14.90 per user, per month. As with most software subscriptions, you save if you choose the option to be billed annually.
Introducing folk: an all-in-one alternative
While Pipedrive and Salesmate are both fantastic options, new kids on the block, folk, offers something a little different.
New users can avoid a steep learning curve and make use of its Notion-like qualities. As well as its powerful AI feature 'Magic Field' and collaborate with teammates effortlessly.
Let's dive into what this looks like in more detail.
Contact management
Bringing in all your contacts couldn't be easier with folk. Sync to your Gmail or Outlook, or upload csv files. Plus, our Chrome extension lets you instantly add an entire profile from any webpage (LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail and more). Once in folk, you can easily sort your contacts into groups, add tags color-coded to your choice, custom fields to record whatever data you want, and filter your views as you like.
Integrations
You can choose to connect with thousands of your favorite apps through Zapier, or make use of folk’s basic integrations that allow you to connect with your Gmail or Outlook account effortlessly.
Pipeline management
folk’s pipeline management system is as easy and intuitive as it gets. With a drag-and-drop Kanban board, which allows for more flexibility and ease of use. You can assign pipelines to team members, customize deal stages, and add or remove deals easily.
Automation
folk is one of the most advanced AI-powered CRMs in the market, with automatic de-duplications, category suggestions, enrichments, and more. Saving you time and effort, so you can focus on things that really matter.
Mail Merge
Add multiple senders from your team, send out ultra-personalized emails in bulk with variables, with the option to review each individual email in a campaign to further customize, if you wish. Then get detailed analytics on deliveries, opens, and clicks, down to the minute they happened.
Enrichment
folk takes enrichment to a whole new level. While there is a standard Enrichment feature, folk also boasts advanced AI-powered Magic Fields, which allow you to request pretty much anything you can think of, including more data on your contacts, or data cleanup.
Collaboration
To empower teams from day one, folk keeps it simple and sweet, with the ability to assign roles and permissions to team members. Shared notes on contacts means everyone is up to date, and you can tag team members on notes and set reminders.
Customer Support
The success of our customers is our top priority, with our efforts headed up by our (now famous) Customer Success Manager Julie. We've got comprehensive FAQs, a quick-start video guide, and a YouTube channel. If you have any issues you can contact support directly and we'll get back to you ASAP.
Ease of use
We've designed our interface to be as intuitive as possible – think minimal chic meets tech-forward. Some have described us as "simple as a spreadsheet, powerful as a CRM". One of the things users love most about folk is how quick it is to set up and get going - practically no onboarding or training needed.
Pricing
You can try folk for free with a 14 day free trial. After that, an annual subscription plan follows.
Standard: $20 per user, per month
Premium: $40 per user, per month
Custom: Starts from $60 per user, per month
Check out our affordable plans on our pricing page
| Pipedrive | folk | Salesmate | |
| Contact management | ★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★ |
| Integrations | ★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ |
| Pipeline | ★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★ |
| Email marketing | ★★★★ | ★★★★ | ★★★ |
| Ease of use and user experience | ★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★ |
| Pricing | ★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★ |
Comparison of Pipedrive and folk by a customer:
Conclusion
Hopefully, now you have an idea of the pros and cons of Pipedrive vs Salesmate as CRMs for your team. Both Pipedrive and Salesmate are solid options but folk can take you to the next level with its AI feature and user-friendly design. There’s no other CRM like it.
Looking for more?
Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
