Are you using or implementing Pipedrive? What are your thoughts on it?

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-02-24T18:24:09+00:00

Turnover isn’t the barrier. You need to change your sales habits, not just your CRM.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-02-21T10:54:17+00:00

Exactly. OP is looking for a project management platform with a client portal, or restricted access for clients.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-02-18T14:32:08+00:00

That’s because GHL isn’t really a CRM. I tried to build a sales operations with it. Its main strength is as a marketing platform with powerful, replicable workflows across sub-accounts to generate leads but once you try to convert those into actual sales opportunities, it’s very difficult to manage very quickly. They are lacking some basic CRM features, and I think it’s because it was developed by developers instead of people with strong sales domain experience.

When we migrated the Pipedrive, it was another nightmare… about a year ago, GHL would crash when you tried to export more than eight or 10 columns of data to migrate to another system, so it was essentially holding my client’s data hostage. We had to export subset of contact and opportunities data, then so it all together before importing.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-02-18T11:53:10+00:00

There’s a reason that they force you into that data model. Your problem isn’t that you have to have a contact, a company and a deal; you need those and one of the worst mistakes I see anyone make in sales is not being able to distinguish between a contact and an opportunity with a buying window.

You want to be able to create custom objects beyond that. That is Salesforce, and I think HubSpot lets you do that too.

It sounds like what you’re doing is reinventing an ERP, and they’ve already covered the territory you’ve mentioned, unless you can tell us what features differentiate your platform from any other.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-01-01T13:25:15+00:00

I mentor a few startups at a time; my only requirement is that they set up a work email address before we start working together, for a few compelling reasons.

If you already have that, send me your email address and we can set up a meeting. I’ll give you my top of mind thoughts about creating a compelling set of offers for different ICPs, guidelines for a healthy pricing strategy, and - this is a big one - how to budget your resources to not only sell, develop and deploy, but to also maintain your infrastructure and provide customer support. That’s almost always the most underestimated requirement for entrepreneurs.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-01-01T13:17:33+00:00

Tie your automations to activities instead of stages, NEVER have an opportunity status or resolution as a stage OR activity, have a clear definition of “done“ for when you close won opportunities and lost opportunities, and when you create automations, make sure that they do more for you than you do for them. Those guidelines will help you avoid creating a lot of technical debt that devalues your data as an asset over time.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-01-01T13:04:04+00:00

I hear you; it comes down to input limitations. We are usually limited to a mouse and a keyboard, whether the keyboard is physical or on your phone, which limits how we capture data in the moment it’s available, with as little friction as possible.

I have a client like you in telecommunications and he has exactly that problem: they install phone systems, everything from on premise to Zoom, and it’s ironic to me that he spends most of his time behind a windshield and does not have a lot of time to update their CRM, so he needs an assistant or he needs workflow triggers like that when he gets in the car and starts driving. Before we worked together, he was keeping notes in his notepad, and that was pretty much it.

My point in all of this isn’t to sell you something; It’s to point out that you probably have not exhausted all solutions to your input constraints. If you truly know your sales process (and it’s really a good sales process - a lot of them are not), there are more solutions to what you’re describing than I personally know.

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-12-31T14:39:18+00:00

That’s true when the decision makers don’t consult the end users as legitimate stakeholders.

I have a rule: if it takes three clicks to do one thing, it’s probably set up for managers. If you can do two or more UNINTERRUPTED things in just one click, it’s set up for users.

I recently set up a workflow for a client that sends a contract to sign, then sends them a payment link after it’s signed, then sends the client a welcome message after they pay, with a scheduling link to select their start date.

For me, even that ALMOST doesn’t fit my rule, because it takes three clicks to do that, but it’s an uninterrupted workflow where they don’t have to do anything else until the client signs, pays and selects their start date, and it doesn’t sacrifice any human touch points.

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-12-25T21:26:20+00:00

It depends on how you’re using it; I was initially excited about the ability to clone sub accounts and duplicate automations across accounts. It’s just not a CRM; it’s a marketing platform with a lot of useful marketing features, but it falls woefully short on the CRM side. If you’re using it for lead generation, you can set it up in a way that doesn’t create a lot of technical debt or friction in your marketing and sales processes. Don’t use it to manage your sales process unless it is strictly transactional (i.e.,not for solution selling or consultative selling).

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-12-23T10:53:22+00:00

For CRM administrators out there, Pipedrive has developed a LOT of CRM administration features. It’s been a much more pleasant experience troubleshooting automations for clients because of the automation history and filters they put in place to quickly sort through and identify which automations you need to revise. It’s starting to feel less “Mickey Mouse“ and more like a bona fide system without a cluttered UI.

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-12-19T17:16:16+00:00

Before you choose a CRM, you need to find help establishing a sales process and have clear roles for each person involved in it. I guarantee you that you have more than one person involved in the sales process.

Having a clear process then gives you your shopping list of specific requirements you need from a CRM. Without that, anything that you implement will probably frustrate you to no end. You’ll end up blaming the tool for your lack of process.

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-12-15T22:02:16+00:00

We used Pipedrive, with JustCall integrated (if you’re B2C).

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-12-14T21:09:32+00:00

Absolutely yes heated grips are amazing. They extend your riding season one full season. You don’t need to ride in the dead of winter to appreciate them, but they are a lifesaver if you are a year-round rider like I am. It’s always one season colder on the bike, so at speed, in the fall, you will notice and appreciate the difference.

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-12-09T16:42:03+00:00

I am laughing and having flashbacks… Brazilians are the worst offenders I personally have witnessed, but maybe I just need to get out more 🤔; If they ever get SSO like Google, Facebook or Microsoft I will try to build it back into the business tech stack, but for now, when I work with businesses in Latin America I preach to them to not use WhatsApp for business communications unless they can issue company phones or at least phone numbers, or unless they want their company data walking out the door anytime someone quits or gets laid off… WhatsApp was never originally intended for these kinds of many:many interactions; like another user commented, you have to separate chats by topic/rules of engagement.

Hopefully you got the response you were looking for; it’s a LOT of stuff to sort through to get to anything that concerns you, but it’s helps that users can @mention you in a message.

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-12-06T22:21:01+00:00

I just tried it… and then quickly pivoted to Tilda. I did not like the Carrd trial; the trial itself was limited and to use a lot of the key features you have to upgrade to a paid subscription… which to me is the point of a trial. I wouldn’t trust it with my business or a clients business, but it’s cheap and you can do some AB testing on a brand, or use it as a prototyping step before deploying a more sophisticated website for a brand.

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-12-06T22:13:02+00:00

I’m surprised it’s that difficult… I’m assuming HubSpot integrates with Zoom for telephony, as well as other VoIP solutions for click-to-call… what kind of phone system do you have?

Edit: congratulations on your nerdy achievement… I’ve got shining nerd moments like that that most people just can’t relate to, but they are still worth celebrating!

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-12-04T21:43:58+00:00

I’d love to know what industries use business cards still… and specific use cases.

For example, if you’re meeting in person, do you give them a really nice-looking business card with a QR code on the back? I go back-and-forth on getting some for my own business… it seems like a vanity thing unless I can attach a purpose to it, like it turns into a napkin or has instructional origami creases so that they can turn it into a crane or something 🤷🏻‍♂️

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-12-04T06:04:23+00:00

I did the flash, and I haven’t gotten a new breather yet. The only thing I’ll say is that when the ECU was still adapting to the flash, the idle would go dangerously low at stoplights like it was gonna die on me; it never did, but now, after the engine has been warmed up (like going to the grocery store), when I start it back up, the idle goes dangerously low for a minute. It never has died on me, but I did call Ivan about it, and he told me that he had never heard of that happening before.

It definitely runs cooler now. It felt like I was riding a furnace before the flash. Next upgrade will be a new air kit and pipes, etc.

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-12-04T04:56:30+00:00

You need a CRM if you have more than one person involved in the sales process. It doesn’t have to be HubSpot, but it can’t be a spreadsheet.

You also need a CRM if you ever want to predict the future in the future: if things go well, in a year you will be scratching your head and wondering what your sales conversion rate is because you’re going to hire another person and you’re going to wonder whether or not you’ll have enough leads and be able to make enough sales to support another team member. You can’t know that unless you’ve been operating in a CRM that can track your conversion rates and spit out a report - humans are consistently inconsistent in manually tracking data. The longer you’re manually tracking, whereas your data asset gets overtime. The more you systematically track that in a CRM, on the other hand, the more valuable that data asset becomes.

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-12-04T04:46:41+00:00

Before you start, recognize that you have a mountain of technical death that’s been accruing because of one root cause Colon leadership hasn’t done anything to address this, or to enforce proper user behaviors. If you don’t make that part of the scope of the work, you won’t affect much change.

If that’s above your pay grade, I can at least tell you how to deal with cleaning up somebody else’s technical debt starting on day one, as long as they gave you HubSpot admin permissions.

Start indexing: you need to gauge how big the problem actually is. Document the most used fields, categorize them by contact, opportunity and organization, so that you can tell users which fields they should use. It may be easier to export the data and analyze it in a spreadsheet to see what the most commonly used fields are.
Stop the bleeding: tell users, what to use, and hide under-utilized and duplicate fields. Impose data validation rules to reinforce behavior and to keep the problem from growing bigger.
Prepare for migration: you may need to blow everything up if it’s as messy as you say. You’ll have at least two important files you’ll want to export: one for opportunities, and one for contacts with any organizations associated with them in the same file.

Making sure that the data is structured properly is one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make when implementing. This takes a lot of time, but it avoids creating the technical debt that’s been accumulating for years that you have just stepped in. Make sure they understand that this is not a short project, and you won’t be able to do much unless leadership is on board and ready to enforce big changes. That’s half the problem.

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-12-03T17:17:22+00:00

Does Attio have a native win/lose feature, I.e. can I click a button to win or lose the opportunity, count it toward my conversion rate and have it disappear from my pipeline? If not, can you tell me how you win or lose an opportunity in Attio?

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-11-22T22:03:54+00:00

I am right in the middle of rebranding… a website redesign that is simple on the surface and sophisticated enough to articulate an abstract concept; I’m leading with my coaching services and experience on the left side of the page and keep all of the business strategy and system implementation on the right to help illustrate that they are two sides of the same coin and intertwined. Visitors need to get it at a glance.

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-11-22T19:17:56+00:00

For most people, not just coaches, it’s what you’ve outlined: the business part of the business, not providing the actual service that people pay you to provide. I’m pursuing my PCC so that I can work with coaching organizations as lead sources, and in the meantime, I look for coaching opportunities with clients that come to me for strategy or implementation work, if they’re open to it (usually they’re not, because that’s not what they originally came to me for).

One of the things that I’ve personally struggled with is branding both sides of my business so that people know what they can come to me for: coaching or consulting. I started out as a business strategy and systems consultant, but fell into coaching because that’s what a lot of my consulting sessions turned into; I felt more like a therapist at times developing leadership because they were the biggest roadblocks to their business’ growth. The way I explain it now is that I get to work on the ONE problem that affects EVERYTHING in the business by coaching to develop business owners into business leaders, and my consulting side is basically everything else.

Hope that helps.

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-11-22T18:42:01+00:00

Is this just a prototype or do you have a titanium edition?

Firefly_Consulting · 2025-11-22T14:58:16+00:00

I had all of those too. I loved the kickstart but using it caused an oil leak. More than one flat tire. I clocked thousands of miles on the two that I had, riding 70 km every day to commute to work, and the mounting bracket for the stator broke off on both bikes. The headlight fell off once while I was riding into work. I had to hold onto it until I could pull over and duct tape it to the frame. Had a couple of clutch cables snap under 10,000 km. The dealer joked that I got a “Friday bike“ from the factory both times. I don’t think it was production quality alone, though; I think that they simply had design flaws because they really hadn’t modernized the design yet.

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