Approach Every Project with Customer Obsession: Interview with Dominic Allon, CEO of Pipedrive

I recently went one-on-one with Dominic Allon, CEO of Pipedrive.

Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?

Dominic: I started my career at a publishing start-up, publishing A/Z directories for students across the UK and Ireland. After a few years, I was ready for a change and went for an MBA at Imperial College, London.

After completing my studies, I spent seven years at The Economist and saw the rise of the key internet media players, which prompted a move to Google in 2007. I spent ten years at Google, including three years as the MD of Google Hong Kong, and then five years in leadership at Intuit QuickBooks, overseeing international markets and developing a thorough understanding of the needs of small businesses around the world.

I started as the CEO of Pipedrive, the leading CRM platform for small businesses, in 2021 and since then I’ve been fully immersed in all facets of the business. An instrumental challenge Pipedrive faced was to establish its place in the CRM industry internationally – focusing on building trust and demonstrating its value in a global market against well-established competitors. 

I’m grateful for the opportunity to work at several leading international media and technology companies throughout various stages of my career. 

Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?

Dominic: A key step small businesses can take to effectively scale their business is to find a deal management platform that easily integrates with their current workflow, allowing them to successfully grow their business based on their needs and goals. Finding a solution that fits the unique needs of a small business without overwhelming or burdening the sales team is crucial to finding success. 

Understanding that Pipedrive’s small business customers don’t necessarily have the resources to integrate expensive and complicated CRMs, it’s crucial for them to find a platform that is accessible, effective, and affordable. This allows them to meet their goals of growing and thriving, without the burden of immense upfront costs and extensive resources. 

Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?

Dominic: If I were to think about the dominant principles or themes that have helped guide me as a leader, number one would be that it’s all about the people. At the end of the day, it’s all about your team. So for me, it’s getting the team of 800 people at Pipedrive motivated and organized around our purpose of helping small businesses grow. 

If we get the people right, then everything else falls into place, and we can do the best possible job of understanding and serving our customers. Prioritizing the team first, then thoroughly understanding the customer problem and figuring out how to solve it, are the principles that I learned at Google and Intuit, and that guide me in my current role at Pipedrive.

Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?

Dominic: There’s no doubt AI will have a long-lasting impact on how business is done. At the moment, we’re living in a copilot world. Large Language Models (LLM) and Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) are increasingly common and augment established ways of working as copilot companions.

Over the medium to long term, I believe there will be an increasing number of areas of work that can be wholly completed by AI tools. The direction of travel will be from copilot to autopilot, resulting in the complete automation of particular processes and capabilities. We approach AI as a tool that serves our core mission of helping small businesses grow. 

Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?

Dominic: There’s always an element of constant innovation when working in technology–the need to constantly change, evolve, question, and reinvent. In particular, it’s essential to have an iterative mindset to test and learn over and over again, doubling down on what’s working well and fine-tuning what’s not. It’s also important not to be afraid to fail and pull back where you’re not making progress. 

Ultimately my role as CEO is to serve our people, customers, and stakeholders in that order. The company has a great history of product-led growth within the overarching technology platform, and I have made it a point to build upon what has succeeded in the past. On the other hand, when I joined, I saw a chance to renew Pipedrive’s vision and strategy, rebuild our senior leadership team, and accelerate our marketing capabilities to evolve into the best version of Pipedrive possible.

Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?

Dominic: Now more than ever, we’re living in a volatile world. As leaders, we need to be responsive and adaptable to the shifting needs and changing habits of consumers. That being said, leaders must be willing to move quickly to get ahead of that curve. They can’t afford to sit around and wait to see what others do. It’s essential they have the courage of their convictions to make the right calls early and do what’s best for both the customers and the business.

Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?

Dominic: The three best tips I have for entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders are that they should always put their people first, constantly strive to deepen their understanding of the customers they serve and to ensure they stay focused on delivering tangible value for their key stakeholders.

What has made Pipedrive a pioneer in the CRM market is our dedication and commitment to small businesses in particular, and crafting our platform with their specific needs at the forefront of our strategy. Investing time in teams across all company sectors is important to understand how to help them meet their short- and long-term goals.

Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing, and branding?

Dominic: What I find to be most important is approaching every project with customer obsession driving every step we take. 

Pipedrive’s approach to innovation, authenticity, and adaptability has allowed our platform to thrive and become the leading CRM for small businesses. My advice for sales, marketing, and branding professionals is to understand the customers’ needs and have that drive every strategic business decision made. By tailoring your approach to your intended audience, you ensure that you can differentiate your brand and offerings from others in your industry. Additionally, when embracing new technologies and innovations, it’s key to always keep irreplaceable social and technical skills you have mastered at the core of your work.

Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?

Dominic: A very simple but powerful tool is to consistently ask: What's the customer problem, and how do we solve it?

Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?

Dominic: When we went to release Pipedrive AI, we were extremely thoughtful about holding back our ‘AI moment’ until we had a genuinely great suite of easy-to-use tools. The most important thing is to understand how these technologies integrate into a business model in the most valuable and effective way possible. That's been really exciting to see. 

We have additional use cases, such as using developer coding assist tools like CoPilot to improve engineering efficiency and job satisfaction. We’ve also enabled ChatGPT Enterprise to ensure that we can maximize the power of generative AI in all the business areas where we create content.

AI is a tool, and like any tool, it will only be as effective as those using it. Right now, those using AI to the best of their abilities know that it’s as helpful as a co-pilot. It will help you get the job done if you know what to ask it for and what it was trained to do well. In the future, we’ll see a more automation-driven version of AI that will unlock various new capabilities for many people, but we’re still a few years removed from that. 


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one-on-one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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