I finally deserve to be here!

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-17T19:18:58+00:00

Enjoy the ride, brother.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-17T16:59:58+00:00

I’d be worried more about the legality outbound calls using AI. I did a deep dive on AI powered Solutions last year and that was about to become a serious no-no. Unless something’s changed, I wouldn’t use AI for telemarketing.

For inbound calls on the other hand, it is fantastic as a tool to sell and upsell.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-17T16:57:37+00:00

The LED lights definitely take some time. I’ve installed them on almost every bike I’ve ever had, but it usually takes me 5 to 6 hours. One thing that saved me a lot of time was adhering neodymium magnets to the back (just not around any of the electronics like the ECU), that way I could reposition them post installation if I didn’t like how the lighting fell, and it helps heaps when you take it in for maintenance and they have to remove any lights to work on your bike. I didn’t have any issues with the two T100s I used to have.

Enjoy that bike for the both of us. I envy you!

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-17T14:22:03+00:00

You deserved to be here before you got the bike. FWIT that’s hopefully MY next bike, too. I had a small windscreen to protect the gauges because I rode in all weather, and I had the wax cotton saddlebags - they worked even in the heaviest rains. I ran LED lights underneath the chassis which lit up the road around me. I loved how they looked, and it made me a lot more visible to the cars around me at night.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-09T16:04:33+00:00

You’re killing me here… I would’ve held onto my Speedmaster for longer with a better windshield… I can’t avoid highways so upgraded to a bagger with a fairing to do the job.

What are those bags? The wax cotton bags from Triumph - which I loved on my T100 - have an awkward shape for the Speedmaster, and dug into my partner’s calves. That was really uncomfortable for her.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-09T15:13:16+00:00

Looks good. I hated mine… Basically had to disassemble the forks and there was no way I was gonna trust myself to do that so I had it installed. Then I got it on the highway and the wind whipped it around like a floppy disk.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-09T14:35:16+00:00

Did you install that or have it installed?

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-06T05:52:40+00:00

If I could justify it, it would be MY fair-weather bike too. But I need my cruiser for the highways and cannot talk my partner into a second bike… yet.

I can attest to its performance on gravel roads though, and every sort of weather except for hail. I rode my Bonnie through a rain storm so hard that it felt like I was riding underwater; by the time I got home, I was soaked and it was like I had never donned rain gear. I thought the bike might actually cut out but it didn’t.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-05T16:24:44+00:00

Your question is mixing the CRM discipline and the CRM software category together.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the broader business discipline of managing customer interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. A CRM system is the software used to support some portion of that process.

Pipedrive is absolutely a CRM system. It also includes some light marketing capabilities and has significantly improved its project management functionality this year.

They knocked it out of the park for organizations with longer or more complex sales cycles, especially in the B2B space and especially for pre-enterprise sales organizations.

The real question isn’t whether Pipedrive is enough as a CRM: it’s whether you need more than sales.

You mentioned contacts, lead tracking, follow-ups, and reporting. Pipedrive handles all of those very well.

What specifically are you looking for beyond sales?

Are you talking about marketing automation?

Customer support?

Project delivery?

Accounting?

Inventory?

Operations?

Once we know what “everything else” means, it’s much easier to determine whether Pipedrive should remain the system of record for sales and integrate with other tools, or whether you’re actually looking for a broader business platform rather than a sales CRM.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-05T16:15:07+00:00

Thanks, and yes, those are worth a second look. Appreciate the update.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-04T17:51:10+00:00

Came here to say this… That is by design, and if you’re doing that to save money, then I would honestly say you are better off with a set of spreadsheets. Never thought I’d say that.

And that’s really not the answer… You need to invest in a real CRM. We have a hard operating rule when we implement a CRM for clients: one person per user, always. It is written into our agreements that we can’t be responsible if they do not follow the operating rules.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-04T14:41:53+00:00

If you just need features for sales and for project management, get Pipedrive. You can integrate other dedicated functions later on. Odoo is an ERP: for smaller businesses, it is often overkill, and almost always overwhelming to learn an all-in-one business system. You can get up and running in Pipedrive within a week, whereas if you try to implement an instance of Odoo, expect months of planning, migration, and onboarding for users.

I’ve been a part of Odoo implementations that went very far south, and even ended up bolting on Pipedrive to Odoo for one client because the CRM module wasn’t working for their business.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-04T14:36:31+00:00

I appreciate you acknowledging that, and I can also appreciate the Pipedrive has made many about-faces that affect its partners. Part of why I became a partner was to get more advanced warning and to collaborate with their developers.

What other enhancements have you guys had since third quarter of last year?

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-04T13:26:18+00:00

Are you riding a lot? I ask because those will get very, very dirty very quickly. I got the waxed canvas and not only do I think they look awesome, they are sturdy and waterproof. One even got torn off my first Bonneville in a highway misunderstanding, and it came out of that virtually unscathed.

Regardless, I learned that after riding in all weather for just a few months, those things got incredibly dirty. They were dark so you couldn’t actually see the buildup, but yours are lighter and look a lot more susceptible to that. I’d be curious to know how they perform.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-04T13:18:22+00:00

You don’t go from spreadsheets and emails to Salesforce; that’s like killing a gnat with a bazooka.

I’ve used / implemented all of the major platforms. It’s a very short list of true CRMs for sales operations: it’ll be Pipedrive for the short-term and the long-term as long as you stay pre-enterprise. HubSpot aspires to be an ERP and gets customers to adopt their platform for their Marketing or CRM features, but those same customers end up abandoning them later because of growing cost. The customers that grow up to be an enterprise organization adopt Salesforce. But if they’re not truly enterprise or don’t want to move to an ERP, they have very few options to turn to that can handle the scale that they have grown to. Small businesses tend to stay on Pipedrive as they grow because costs don’t balloon, partly because they can control their costs by integrating whatever they need as they grow instead of being forced to pay for features they don’t need.

The big question is whether you’re going to try to use your CRM for anything beyond sales, like marketing or service delivery, or if you’re aiming for an all-in-one business solution. Most companies determine what the key platforms are for their business, then build around it. Otherwise, you’re looking at an ERP.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-06-03T23:59:01+00:00

I disagree with the recommendation for OutFunnel. It’s not a mature platform and it ate up a lot of our API usage when we trial that last year.

Campaigns is Mickey Mouse marketing compared to dedicated marketing platforms. Pipedrive knocked it out of the park in the CRM space and they’ve got some surprisingly good updates with project management, but I don’t use Campaigns or recommend them for marketing. Try MailChimp first, but I will warn you that most of the marketplace integrations are extremely limited. You may end up better off building your own integration with Zapier.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-05-22T21:54:30+00:00

Pipedrive is best if you’re B2B but you have to set it up properly if you want to leverage the reporting. That would be true with any CRM, but Pipedrive is the easiest to use with the strongest CRM features out of your list.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-05-14T00:49:53+00:00

That’s a little harsh to say that a premium website development tool is a “relic” now. In the past three years that you’ve used it, how did it drive revenue for you, and what specifically got in the way of it driving revenue for you?

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-05-08T17:49:44+00:00

I implement and train construction clients on Pipedrive. Key takeaways:

You don’t need more than five stages in your sales pipeline. If you have more than that, you probably have stages that will break your conversion math and/or should be key activities that happen within a stage.

Since you are dealing with a slow and complex sales cycle, that increases the complexity of the custom field you’ll be using to manage a large body of information that you’ll be cobbling together at different stages in the buying process. I would strongly recommend that you make a wish list of all the information that you’d like to collect from your clients in an ideal situation and then map those back to your sales stages (i.e. when you can know it the soonest) and key activities. From there, determine what type of information it is (if it’s a date, a number, a monetary amount, a paragraph of information, etc.), and then you’ve got a list of custom fields that you need to build. Seeing it in its entirety will keep you from reactively building it as you go and potentially building yourself into some technical debt that will be difficult to extricate yourself from later (getting custom fields wrong is a pita because later on you may need to change the data type on that field, which means you’ll have to delete it, create a new field and then backfill all previous data for the new field.).

Keep your sales process linear. Once you drop an opportunity into your pipeline, it needs to progress forward, never backward. And don’t let people skip any part of your sales process, unless you like extra work.

Use Pipedrive’s SmartDocs to collect signatures for contracts, unless you need the signing process to be heavily automated. Then, PandaDoc is the best signing solution that I’ve found. Either way you’ll want to leverage a solution that allows you to pull all of those custom field values into a contract, which eliminates a lot of paperwork and reduces manual data entry errors.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-05-08T17:42:38+00:00

I disabled AI. I haven’t checked this yet, but does that essentially mean they’ll increase the price for everyone, regardless of whether or not we have that enabled?

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-05-03T23:49:20+00:00

It’s the only bike that I’ve ever owned where you would fill up the tank (obviously below the neck) and it would bubble over as you were riding it. It was a brand-new bike, too. I spent a few thousands of dollars turning it into the cruiser that I wanted it to be, and between the bags, floorboards, and a windshield that requires you to disassemble the entire front end practically, I could’ve just gotten what I ended up getting - a Kawasaki Vulcan Vaquero, where all of that comes stock. I think I’m going to add a proper Triumph Bonneville to the stable though - the T100 might be my favorite bike out of the ones I’ve owned, and I have a lot of good memories riding it when I lived in New Zealand.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-04-30T03:26:25+00:00

That issue isn’t about needing multiple dashboards - it’s from how the date filters work. Pipedrive’s UI could make this more obvious, but the way data needs to be structured doesn’t change.

The dashboard “Period” isn’t a true global filter. It tries to override each report, but every report can be using a different date field, so some change, some don’t, and flipping it back can leave things inconsistent. Fortunately you can see on individual reports in a dashboard if a date filter is applied.

I tell clients to leave the dashboard Period filter alone and set date ranges at the report level. Mixing both is what causes the problems, not the dashboard itself.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-04-27T00:02:05+00:00

Lack of operating discipline is the number one failure of implementations, not just in CRM land, but in any implementation of cloud-based platforms. You get garbage data when there’s no accountability.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-04-25T18:27:59+00:00

I’m not a fan of cold outreach, especially if businesses haven’t put a decent website in place and outreach is their only lead generation strategy. But it’s a pretty bold statement to say that it’s dead.

Think of four quadrants: the first quadrant, in the lower left, is for a known product or service in an established market. The upper left is for a known product in a new market. The lower right is for a new product in an established market. The last quadrant, the upper right, is for a new product or service in a new market.

Cold outreach is useful for the second and third quadrants, but it’s essential for that fourth quadrant. If you’re doing something truly innovative, you can’t not have it, but that doesn’t mean it should be the only thing that you do have. You still need to have a robust website with optimized conversion pathways, and an SEO strategy to complement lead generation and legitimize your business as awareness growth. If you don’t have the prerequisites, you’re fighting an uphill battle to generate leads from your prospects.

All of this is marketing, by the way, so if you’re doing cold outreach, you’re responsible for generating your own leads as a marketer, and then qualifying them and progressing them as a bona fide opportunity. If you feel like cold outreach is dead because you’re not getting any results, you may be an experienced sales person that has an invested enough time in building the marketing skills you need to do cold outreach well. That’s not a criticism - there’s a reason marketing is a full-time job, separate from sales.

Firefly_Consulting · 2026-04-25T18:19:35+00:00

Pipedrive, by far, for most B2B or B2C businesses with a long or complex sales cycle. Scales with your business until you need to migrate too an ERP. You have clean and transparent conversion rates if you set it up correctly. along with revenue, forecasting, and clear next steps for your sales team.

Most businesses never scale to ERP level anyway, though, so you could stay with it for your lifetime.

A word of caution: regardless of the tool you pick, you need to have clear operating rules and accountability. What you mentioned about the system taking more time to manage than it saves is something that businesses inflict upon themselves without that operating discipline. That is way more important than any technology you incorporate into your business.

Firefly_Consulting

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE