SalesTechStar Interview with Shaun Shirazian, Chief Product Officer at Pipedrive

Shaun Shirazian, Chief Product Officer at Pipedrive comments on the growth and benefits of app marketplaces and the impact of sales automation in salestech in this short Q&A catch-up:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Shaun, tell us about yourself and your role at Pipedrive

Thank you for having me! I joined Pipedrive 18 months ago from Intuit where I spent 12 years starting and scaling a variety of products and businesses aimed at helping small and medium-sized businesses thrive. For the last six years at Intuit, I worked in Brazil and the UK, leading product teams across the Americas and EMEA. Most recently, I was the Country Manager for the Rest of World business at QuickBooks. And before that, I spent four years at Procter & Gamble in Brand Management.

Pipedrive is a CRM platform designed to help businesses collect and analyze different parts of their sales processes. If companies centralize contact information, it allows them to maximize the value of each interaction with their customers throughout the sales process.

Tracking sales has another benefit – gathering and analyzing insights helps find clever opportunities for improvements and shorten the sales cycle. That’s our core purpose – to help small businesses grow by creating easy-to-use, smart and effective tools that convert challenges into opportunities. My role as the Chief Product Officer is to develop and execute the company’s product journey, making sure that our product and localization teams keep building and advancing tools that our customers actually need to be better in their everyday work.

We’d love to hear more about Pipedrive’s latest enhancements and especially how the new developer hub enables end users to optimize use of the platform?

As the name suggests, Pipedrive Developer Hub is a centralized and robust online app development platform for developers and technology partners. The dedicated environment enables developers to access all the tools they need to build and manage scalable and secure app integrations for Pipedrive’s Marketplace. The easy-to-navigate hub enables a fast, efficient and time-saving development process, driving user experience quality in integrations built for Pipedrive customers.

Customer obsession is at the heart of everything we do at Pipedrive. Our formula of success lies in providing our customers with an easy and effective sales CRM, with the potential to maximize the value of the core functionality by integrating the platform with apps available through our third-party ecosystem. The easier the apps integrate with Pipedrive, the better the user experience for our customers. That’s what our Developer Hub aims to provide. As a result, by syncing all the business data across systems all in one place, small companies can have a complete, customizable, and agile tech stack that covers the revenue management lifecycle. This means the potential to turn data into intelligence.

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Can you talk about the future of app ecosystems and marketplaces and how do you see the future of this within martech/salestech shaping up?

The future of app ecosystems and marketplaces is already here. Our customer data shows that salespeople and their teams use dozens of tools to do their job.

As a CRM provider, our aim is to make sure that all the integrations are able to interact with each other seamlessly and that customers can sync business data all in one place. This enables different teams to have a complete view of all the data across tools to cover the revenue management lifecycle and make the right business decisions.

To stay competitive, a great apps marketplace is always an ever-growing ecosystem of tools – taking into account customers’ evolving business challenges as well as customers’ market-specific needs. In the near future, AI and automation will play a big role in further boosting productivity and driving interconnectivity between tools, enabling AI-generated learnings which will be available to customers.

For platforms/SaaS makers who haven’t yet jumped onto the app and integration bandwagon to help their platforms be more easily usable and adaptable: what key points would you share?

Customer obsession is the keyword here (again!). Firstly, it’s important to assess if and in which way customers would benefit from the availability of different apps and integrations. The biggest advantage of integrations is their capability to amplify the value of the core platform. Depending on the product, opening up your tool with a public API is already a significant step to speed up the development processes or enable integration between different systems.

However, bringing in new data capabilities and delivering a unified view of data simplifies the business intelligence processes for customers and helps make informed decisions. When done right, a marketplace can benefit the company by providing additional potential for revenue growth by amplifying the value of the core product, simplifying the adoption of new solutions for customers as well as enhancing the overall customer experience.

A partner ecosystem, just like Pipedrive Developer Hub, facilitates app development. It’s a huge value creator but also requires long-term strategic investments and commitment, as partner relationships and the community around your product take time to develop. In the long run, an effective and technically fully stacked partner ecosystem supports the organic growth of your marketplace.

What are some thoughts you have in mind regards to the future of B2B salestech?

Sales enablement and sales automation are the two buckets on which B2B sales tech continues to expand.

Constantly increasing digital buying behavior means that the key to success lies in capturing, organizing, analyzing and contextually understanding customer data and making informed decisions based on essential real-time insights. However, I believe that the essence of sales remains the same, no matter the technological advancements available to sales professionals. Personalized experiences, value-based buying journeys, long-term relationships and real human connection still play a big role, it’s just the process that has been digitized.

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Can you highlight more on the impact of AI in sales and where you see it changing the game for sellers down the line?

From the very beginning, the first SaaS-based CRM tools aimed to boost productivity and help build more effective processes, concentrate on high-value tasks and avoid human error. The future of AI still lies around effectiveness. In general, there are two main benefits of AI in sales. Firstly, efficiency: which means doing more with fewer resources. Automation is the main point here, decreasing the number of repetitive tasks, doing tasks quicker and saving a lot of valuable time. And secondly, effectiveness: or, in other words, delivering business results at a higher standard.

From this perspective, using AI in sales has a lot of potential. Long-term, AI will help to analyze existing sales data more efficiently and will increase the conversion rate by improving sales predictability and business forecasting. Not only will it serve for planning business operations, it will also help to plan and execute a personalized and smarter customer experience. Additionally, AI has the potential to transform the way sales and marketing teams collaborate and uplift post-sales customer communication.

Some key elements of sales are likely to stay the same over time, no matter the availability of different technological advancements. For example, the capability of building real human connections or concentrating on actual customer needs. Armed with data management, the future of sales is AI-powered, but still human-controlled.