How Pipedrive Transformed Promotions with Monthly Compensation Planning Cycles

After experiencing exceptional headcount growth, Pipedrive needed a more powerful, flexible, and secure compensation management platform to run more effective cycles and better communicate pay to employees.

After implementing Pave’s Compensation Planning and Total Rewards products, Pipedrive’s compensation team can run monthly promotion cycles with ease, build accurate audit trails, and improve the employee experience for all things pay-related.

• Provided rules-based guidance to every manager so they can make compensation decisions with confidence
• Gave the compensation team and leadership group transparency and control over compensation budgets
• Moved away from error-prone compensation planning spreadsheets in favor of improved accuracy, security, and confidentiality
• Replaced manual, Excel-based communication of individual pay outcomes with a modern, trusted total rewards portal for every employee
• Accelerated leadership review and approval of monthly promotions

Founded in Estonia in 2010, Pipedrive is an easy and effective CRM for small and medium-sized companies, empowering them to unlock their business potential and scale. The company experienced massive growth, and quickly found themselves with a global team of nearly 1,000 employees. However, in the midst of rapid hiring, they hadn’t put in all of the systems required to support their growth—particularly when it came to pay practices. They realized the way they managed compensation wasn’t working effectively.

Tanya Krasnova, Sr. Rewards & Benefits Manager, joined the Pipedrive team to help develop the job architecture and grading systems, communicate changes to the team, and set up other pay processes across the international organization—a large lift for their compensation team of two. Fortunately, Pipedrive was already in talks with Pave to begin using compensation management software for this crucial work.

When Tanya joined Pipedrive, the bulk of processes related to pay were being handled in Excel. She used spreadsheets to cut compensation data, edit and update the data, and share files for managers and employees. The pain points and risks that came with this process were numerous. Not only was it manual and error-prone, it was inaccurate, since spreadsheets are always a step behind the information in the HRIS. Security and confidentiality were another big problem, as pay information was shared directly with managers and employees via spreadsheet. 

“We would create all these files—literally a file per person in Excel—and share it with the manager,” Tanya said. “Because we were dealing with confidential compensation information, we had to be extremely careful to ensure it was shared with the right person. It added an extra layer of stress to an already manual process.” 

This system didn’t provide a great experience for employees either. Their pay conversations with managers would involve looking over compensation information in a basic spreadsheet. From Tanya’s point of view, it was a very outdated solution that didn’t do anything to boost Pipedrive’s employer brand.

“There has been huge positive feedback from managers. Now they have a clearer framework and visibility into the bigger picture, which helps them make more confident, consistent decisions.”
—Tanya Krasnova, Sr. Rewards & Benefits Manager, Pipedrive

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The Pipedrive team leveraged Pave’s Compensation Planning tool to enable a smoother, more intuitive process for managers to make compensation decisions. Tanya is able to share guidelines in advance of cycles that help managers in their approach and boost confidence in decision-making. When they log into Pave for a compensation cycle, they can see all their team members at once, view their compa ratios, and see how the recommendations they make will impact those compa ratios and their overall budget. 

“There has been huge positive feedback from managers,” Tanya said. “Now they have a clearer framework and visibility into the bigger picture—things like compa ratios and budget impact—which helps them make more confident, consistent decisions.” Plus, the ability to set permissions around who sees what information means privacy and security risks are solved for—a huge win for the team.

“I view [the Pave team] as an extension of my team. Any time I have a reward-related question, or need help with the tool, or just to brainstorm how we can use it more effectively, they're there.”
—Tanya Krasnova, Sr. Rewards & Benefits Manager, Pipedrive

Pave’s Compensation Planning product also helps with regaining control of the compensation budget. As part of Pipedrive’s compensation philosophy, they run monthly promotion cycles, which allows the team to budget for a steady rate of promotion increases per month instead of a large spike once a year—and ensures employees who deserve promotions aren’t held up by annual cycles. Compensation Planning gives Tanya a single source of truth for this process. Every stakeholder, from the People Partners to finance leadership, benefits from leveraging Pave to remove manual work and provide a seamless audit trail.

“Every month, we sit down with our CFO and our CPCO, and we literally open up Pave and approve [the promotions],” Tanya said. “Because they’re able to approve right in Pave, I don't have to worry about any other approvals—it's all saved there. If we have an audit, we can always just go back to the cycle.”

When it comes to communicating with employees, the process has been improved by leaps and bounds with the implementation of Pave’s Total Rewards product. Now, Pipedrive employees can view all their pay and equity information in their unique portal—a much more modern approach than the previous spreadsheet method.

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Looking forward, Tanya will continue to tap into Pave’s dedicated support team. She loves that Pave provides experts in her corner who can get involved in the nitty-gritty details of compensation with her. With their help, she has been leveraging Pave to create customized solutions for Pipedrive. 

For example, Pipedrive’s compensation philosophy is to pay employees within 80% to 120% of the market median for their role. Pave helped implement a flag that alerts Tanya when someone falls below the 80% threshold, which prompts an internal review.

Tanya also recently implemented a custom calculation that leverages Pave’s integration with Carta, flagging when an employee is below the allocated level of stock options set out in Pipedrive’s options grade framework. This enables proactive, data-driven decisions about equity awards, helping ensure alignment with Pipedrive’s compensation philosophy.

“I view [the Pave team] as an extension of my team. Any time I have a reward-related question, or need help with the tool, or just to brainstorm how we can use it more effectively, they're there,” Tanya said. “They've become like colleagues—not just a client relationship, but a colleague relationship.”