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How Pipedrive helped Combat Ready streamline sales and improve workflow efficiency

Combat Ready helps individuals and organizations improve their leadership and decision-making skills. Its instructors are military veterans and civilians with expertise in entrepreneurship, coaching, teaching, national security, professional sports and creative industries.

“We provide tools and services to enable everyone to grow where they want to grow,” explains Remo Ojaste, CEO and founder of Combat Ready.

  • Industry: Leadership and tactical training
  • Location: Europe
  • Key feature: The Kanban pipeline
Combat Ready Case Study Pipedrive

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Pipedrive users since Combat Ready launched

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Sales pipeline stages, from lead generation to invoicing

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Metrics monitored using the Insights feature

How Combat Ready put Pipedrive into action

CEO and founder Remo Ojaste has been using Pipedrive since 2019 – at first at a previous business and at Combat Ready since the very beginning. The company is currently on the Professional plan, Pipedrive’s most popular. This includes advanced reporting, pipeline management and lead-routing tools (such as Insights) that Remo says are ideal for the size of the business.

Prior to 2019, Remo worked in the military and had become accustomed to manual processes and using Microsoft Office applications such as Outlook and Excel. Like so many Pipedrive customers, his frustration with numerous folders and clunky spreadsheets led him to find a way to simplify his workflow and optimize the sales process.

Remo says customizing the CRM to the specific needs of the business has been “very easy.” To achieve this, he “invented [his] own system within the system,” which involved creating different pipelines for different products and services. This is necessary because Combat Ready works with companies in various sectors and offers a multitude of resources, including publishing, in-classroom courses, outdoor excursions and online training.

Initially I had no idea what Pipedrive was. I didn’t even know what a CRM was. But I said to myself, ‘Surely there has to be something better than Outlook!’ I knew there had to be software out there that was purpose-built to support customers.
When I worked in the military, I pretty much used Excel for everything. I learned how to use it inside out, which became very useful later on, as Pipedrive’s Kanban view allows me to work with similar sequences and flows, and the migration was simple and intuitive. Being able to link deals was the most amazing thing for me.
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Remo OjasteCEO and founder, Combat Ready

Structure, simplicity and clarity on every mission

Pipedrive’s Kanban view enables users to guide new projects through key milestones until completion. It’s a visual representation of your sales pipeline, where deals are displayed as cards on a board. You can easily track their progress through different stages of the sales process by simply dragging and dropping them between columns. The result is a clear, at-a-glance overview of where each deal stands.

Remo rates the Kanban view highly and says color coding is also a real benefit. Pipedrive’s deal labels feature enables users to add color-coded labels to each deal to help keep data organized and speed up the sales process.

Pipedrive’s Insights feature is where users find interactive dashboard software. It helps sales teams in particular to recognize winning patterns so that they can optimize their workflow and marketing campaigns. For Combat Ready, this includes such metrics as the number of leads and where they’re coming from, as well as details of key logistics – for instance, how many people attended a training course, which instructors are available and when and where products like notebooks need to be collected from.

Each of our pipelines goes from lead to closing actions. It doesn’t matter what the deal is, it goes through the same pipeline process. The only differentiation we’ve made is for partnerships or inactive deals, so we don’t see all of them in one place.
We have 13 stages in a pipeline, beginning with ‘lead’ to ‘contact made’ to ‘keeping contact’, and ending with ‘training delivered’ to ‘invoice sent’ to ‘closing actions’. The whole team knows when they have a part to play in this, whether it’s me, the sales team, our accountant or whoever. It’s very much like a linear, step-by-step, factory solution.
Just having everything in one place is great. The Kanban view visualization is the best thing about Pipedrive. Color coding – green, grey, red – is also very useful. For a person using Pipedrive day-to-day, it’s a very good system, as is having the ability to put in prices which will automatically calculate your money flow.
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Remo OjasteCEO and founder, Combat Ready

How the Combat Ready team uses specific Pipedrive features

Here are some key Pipedrive stages and their benefits for Combat Ready:

Kanban view
The Kanban View for sales pipeline management

The Kanban view has helped Combat Ready to visualize deal progression and improve workflow, simplify tracking of sales stages and team accountability and enable easy deal movement across stages.

“The Kanban view visualization is the best thing about Pipedrive,” says Remo.

Insights and custom dashboards
Insights and custom dashboards

Custom Insights dashboards have provided a clear picture of sales progress and customer behaviors. They have helped track lead sources, customer demographics and financials and facilitated real-time monitoring of deals and training attendance.

“The statistics part helps us track habits and behaviors,” explains Remo.

Task management
Task management

Task management features have helped the team streamline task assignments based on deal stages, ensuring follow-ups and actions are consistently scheduled and streamlining sales and post-training processes.

“If a deal moves from proposal to training schedule, automatic actions should follow,” says Remo. “The team now handles it efficiently.”

Now Combat Ready has new targets in its sights

Remo says Pipedrive’s main advantage is its realistic nature. He points out how the CRM accurately reflects human communication within the business.

With Pipedrive in tow, Combat Ready is now considering whether to apply an “extreme ownership” approach to the business. This refers to the principles of US Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, outlined in their book, Extreme Ownership.

This philosophy emphasizes decentralized command (i.e., empowering employees to make decisions within their specific areas of responsibility). Remo sees AI as taking a central role in this, which might mean integrating AI decision-making, automation and data-driven insights to further enhance efficiency.

Aside from this, his main objective at present is continuing to extend Combat Ready’s reach beyond Estonia and into Europe and the wider world.

We might have one person sending out a few emails and another sending ten times that amount. Pipedrive enables me to see this reality clearly and provides the statistics I need. It’s a reassuring confirmation of what’s happening in real life.
In terms of monitoring efficiencies, you couldn’t do that with Outlook. It’s definitely 100 million times more efficient than Excel. Pipedrive does the calculation for you and it’s easier to hand over to the next person in the chain. Its simplicity is very good.
The future is in technology – scaling our expertise into tools that help leaders in real-time. But this is only possible when AI technology works this way, is easy to use and is trustworthy.
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Remo OjasteCEO and founder, Combat Ready

Combat Ready team photo

What’s next for Combat Ready?

Combat Ready has used Pipedrive to streamline its sales pipeline, improve workflow efficiency and gain valuable business insights. By centralizing its operations, the company has set a strong foundation for continued growth and innovation.

Thanks to this strong foundation, Remo is already looking to the future and considering how Combat Ready can integrate AI into its product and internal processes.

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