From 18 Years of Salesforce to One Month in Pipedrive

How Encore Land & Sea streamlined their sales and project operations with Pipedrive — and a partner who actually knows their business.

⚡About Encore Land & Sea

Encore Land & Sea is a Florida-based company exclusively focused on the installation of CMCE Lightning Suppression Systems — technology that prevents lightning strikes before they occur. Their client base spans cruise ships, private yachts, million-dollar residences, high-rises, private islands, and large commercial properties.

🔍The Challenge

After 18 years on Salesforce, Dick needed a fresh start that matched the agility of his new business. His pain wasn’t cost — it was complexity. Every time the team needed something customized, it required an outside programmer. Support was impersonal: a ticket here, a late-night callback there.

18 Years on Salesforce: Powerful, but complex. Every customization required an external developer and support meant starting over with someone new each time.

Tried “Pipeline” CRM: Signed up for a year-long subscription. Abandoned it in just the second month — it simply didn’t deliver.

Discovered Pipedrive via SaaShop: Within one month, Encore Land & Sea was fully live — with a custom two-pipeline workflow and automations running.

“I abandoned a year-long subscription — which I was in the second month — and moved over to Pipedrive, and we haven’t regretted it for a moment. It’s incredibly robust.”

— Dick Putt, Founder & CEO, Encore Land & Sea

⚙️The Solution

Sales Pipeline

Encore uses Pipedrive’s visual kanban-style sales pipeline to manage every prospective deal — linking companies and contacts, categorizing commercial vs. residential clients, and tracking each deal through fully customized stages designed around their unique workflow.

Projects Pipeline (Post-Sale)

Rather than using Pipedrive’s default “won deal” behavior, Dick built a bespoke post-sale workflow: won deals remain visible in a “Closed Deals This Month” column through month-end. A month-end automation then marks them as won and simultaneously duplicates each deal into a separate Projects pipeline — where the installation team manages every job through completion and payment collection.

“It’s the best poor man’s project manager that I could find. It’s simple to use. It’s exactly what we do on the sales side.” — Dick Putt

✨Key Pipedrive Features

Visual Pipeline

Kanban-style deal view gives an instant snapshot of the entire sales funnel — Dick calls it “extremely powerful.”

Automations

Month-end automation handles deal lifecycle management and auto-populates the Projects pipeline — no manual effort needed.

Custom Workflows

Full customization of stages, fields, and reports without writing a line of code or hiring a developer.

AI Reporting

“Now that they’ve added AI, it’s even simpler. I just tell AI, give me a report that tells me this — and I have it momentarily.”

Team Adoption

Reps engage with Pipedrive far more readily than they ever did with Salesforce — intuitive design reduces friction.

Dual Pipeline

Separate pipelines for pre-sale and post-sale operations, seamlessly connected via automation.

“Pipedrive is very intuitive in the way it’s built. We were very much able to do so many things how we want — which gives us an opportunity to do a lot of trials. If we don’t like the way something works, we change it so we can constantly adapt Pipedrive to the needs of our business.”

— Dick Putt, Founder & CEO, Encore Land & Sea

🤝The SaaShop Difference

A critical — and often overlooked — element of Encore’s success is their partnership with SaaShop. Dick explicitly contrasted the SaaShop experience with years of impersonal Salesforce support.

“Franki at SaaShop knows our business well enough that I really don’t have to educate her too much on where we are. She kind of keeps current with it and then we’re able to easily implement new things.”

— Dick Putt

“Nobody at Salesforce ever knew our business. We’d get a different person each time, and it was really difficult. Every time, it’s like starting over.”

— Dick Putt

With Salesforce, support meant submitting a trouble ticket and waiting for a callback at 7–8pm from someone unfamiliar with the account. With SaaShop, it’s a continuous, knowledgeable relationship — a partner who understands the business and anticipates its needs.

🎯Results & Looking Ahead

Encore Land & Sea is now fully operational on Pipedrive, running two custom pipelines, automated workflows, and AI-generated reports — all configured in under a month with no outside development costs. The business is growing fast enough that Dick — who once envisioned retirement — is now focused entirely on scaling.

“Our success has destroyed that vision of retirement… I really am enjoying growing this business.”

— Dick Putt

Looking ahead, Dick plans to implement formal KPI tracking in Pipedrive once the company completes its rebrand. Succession planning is also underway as he prepares his #2 to eventually run day-to-day operations — with Pipedrive as the operational backbone.