How a Global CRM Software Provider Drives Agility With Enterprise Suite

The search engine optimization (SEO) team at Pipedrive is responsible for driving organic website traffic, conversions, and revenue for the company by producing high-quality written resources, visual assets, videos, and other relevant content.

Pipedrive is a global customer relationship management (CRM) provider used by revenue teams across more than 100,000 businesses worldwide. The company helps businesses track sales pipelines, optimize leads, manage deals with AI, and automate the sales process. 

The challenge 

While contributors on the internal SEO team are highly skilled and productive, the team faced bandwidth challenges with meeting increased demand for production and realized the need to engage external expertise. By engaging freelancers on Upwork, Pipedrive has tripled productivity across the SEO team. 

The solution

Turning to Upwork to quickly engage freelancers and scale productivity

As Pipedrive is a long-time Upwork customer, freelancers from Upwork already play an important role in the SEO team’s production process. Productivity on the SEO team is measured by the number of pieces of content produced and published on the website. With the support of freelancers from Upwork, Pipedrive can manage and publish a significantly higher volume of content.

“One challenge Upwork helps our team address is agility,” said Syed Ali Nemath (Ali), Senior SEO Manager at Pipedrive. “We rely on Upwork to access trusted freelancers who can come in either for a longer project or at a moment's notice to produce content really efficiently and at the [high-quality] level we need. We can now handle a higher volume, and if something comes up with an urgent deadline, we can react quickly.”

In 2024, the team realized some channels weren’t performing as well as intended and wanted to increase production to improve performance. 

By doubling its investment in freelancers on Upwork, the Pipedrive SEO team tripled its productivity as a result. 

Streamlining the vetting and hiring process

One way Upwork helps Pipedrive increase productivity is by simplifying the process of vetting and engaging freelancers.

“What I really enjoy about Upwork is how easy it is to vet new talent,” said Ali. “I can really vet who's right for each job, using star ratings and earnings to understand each freelancer’s experience with the platform, as well as reviewing profiles and links to previous work. It's not only about the talent available on Upwork, but also the ease of sorting through options that makes it such a great platform.”

Specific features that help Pipedrive effectively vet and engage qualified freelancers include: 

• Account management and customer success team. As an Enterprise Suite customer, Pipedrive has a dedicated account manager. Any time the Pipedrive team faces a challenge on the platform, the account management team points them in the right direction to address the challenge, such as a support team member or billing representative, to quickly resolve the issue.
• Expert-Vetted talent. Enterprise Suite customers like Pipedrive have access to Expert-Vetted talent, meaning the top 1% of freelancers on Upwork, who have completed a rigorous pre-screening process to validate their technical expertise and soft skills. 
• Job Post Generator. While Pipedrive builds meaningful relationships and reengages many freelancers, when the team needs to access a new skill set, Job Post Generator helps simplify the process of drafting a job post. Job Post Generator, powered by Uma, Upwork’s mindful AI, creates an AI-generated, fully customizable job post draft in seconds—all the Pipedrive team needs to start the process is share what they’re looking for with the open job.

Managing spending with built-in reporting 

Given its fast-moving, agile work environment, Pipedrive needs to onboard talent and tools quickly, while also keeping budget top of mind. 

Built-in reporting tools available through Upwork’s Enterprise Suite also enable Pipedrive to track and manage their team’s spending on Upwork to stay within budget.  

“Every month, I go to my transaction history tab, pull a CSV file for the previous month, and tally up the numbers,” shared Ali. “This helps me clearly understand how much has been spent based on our existing budget and forecast more effectively for future months.” 

The Purchase Orders (P.O.) Report, a feature exclusive to Enterprise Suite customers, also helps Pipedrive ensure each team is working within and adhering to their own budget. “The whole reporting ecosystem really helps us understand who's spending what and make sure that one team's budget doesn't get tangled in with another,” added Ali. “So the built-in reporting tools have been a really great feature for us.”

The results 

Successful SEO project examples 

The Pipedrive SEO team engages freelancers on Upwork with a range of skills for a variety of projects. 

Pipedrive projects on Upwork have a fill rate of 95% and an average time to hire of three to five business days.

“Even though we're a relatively large team, to hit the high production volume and maintain the quality we need, we rely on Upwork and the experts and freelancers we find on the platform,” shared Ali. “We work with copywriters, content writers, designers, data analysts, translators, and other freelancers with different skill profiles to achieve what we need to do.” 

Two of the most successful projects stand out to the Pipedrive team. 

Supporting expansion into new markets with a Dutch language blog

Given Pipedrive’s global customer base, the company reaches target markets in many different languages. For some of the markets, either internal team members don't have the necessary language expertise or the team is underresourced to support ongoing SEO content creation.

To address this challenge, Pipedrive’s SEO team turns to Upwork for market-specific content creation and translation. With the help of freelancers on Upwork, Pipedrive produces search engine-optimized blogs in languages such as Dutch, Polish, and Swedish. The Dutch language blog launched at the beginning of 2025 and quickly achieved high rankings for target keywords, with 30 to 40% of primary keywords appearing in the top 10 (first page) of search results and some keywords reaching the top five results.

Writing customer case studies

Customer case studies help Pipedrive engage prospects and highlight the value the company delivers to existing customers. Encouraging customers to participate can take time because case studies aren’t the highest priority in their day-to-day work. Each time a customer agrees to an interview, the Pipedrive SEO team is eager to produce and publish the case study as quickly and efficiently as possible. 

“When we spend several hours getting to the stage at which the customer is ready to talk to you, we don’t want to spend another five to 10 hours writing the case study and making sure it’s accurate,” said Ali. “Any time we can offload the process to someone else, that’s great.”  

Ali brought in a writer through Upwork with whom he’s built a trusted relationship and the writer now quickly develops case studies based on transcripts from customer interviews. This process enables the SEO team to efficiently produce each case study and move on to the next one.

Continuing to scale by building strong freelancer relationships

Pipedrive has been an Enterprise Suite customer since 2019 and continues to build strong relationships with freelancers across multiple skill sets to address challenges and meet the SEO team’s agility and productivity needs. 

Ali shared, “Upwork is probably the only solution of its type that we know of in the market where there's a real breadth of talent on the platform and you also have the opportunity to form professional relationships with freelancers.”