Zendesk Sell vs Pipedrive: An Honest Comparison for Business Owners
Zendesk Sell is retiring in August 2027. Compare it honestly with Pipedrive, feature by feature, and find out if your migration could be an upgrade.
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For many growing businesses, referrals are the first growth engine. They are also a sign that customers trust the work. But referrals alone can be hard to predict, scale, or build a hiring plan around. In this episode of The Motii Playbook, Fred Schnell speaks with Marta El Bay, Head of Partnerships at Surfe, about what it takes to move from word-of-mouth growth to a more deliberate outbound motion. The conversation is practical, honest, and refreshingly grounded: before buying another tool or chasing another AI workflow, businesses need to understand who they serve, clean up the way their teams work, and build a simple system they can actually use.
Intro: Motii acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia. We pay our respects to elders past and present and acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first peoples of this land.
Welcome to the Motii Playbook. If you've ever felt like your systems are technically in place, but somehow still feel chaotic behind the scenes, you're in the right spot. This is where we share what we're seeing, what's working, what's not, and the lessons businesses learn the hard way. Think of it as practical strategy straight from the trenches. Let's dive in.
Fred Schnell: Welcome to the Motii Playbook. One shift, one system, one measurable improvement. I'm Fred Schnell, Managing Director at Motii. Today's conversation is about something a lot of growing businesses will recognise. At some point, relying on word of mouth and referrals is simply not going to be enough to keep growing. You will need to be more deliberate about how you find and win new clients. And that's what today's conversation is going to be all about. I'm very much looking forward to this conversation actually because Motii itself still has a bit to learn in that space as well. So, I'm joined by Marta El Bay, Head of Partnerships at Surfe. Marta, welcome. Now, for people hearing your name for the first time, do you mind just giving us a short introduction to yourself, what Surfe does, and who it is built for?
Marta El Bay: Yeah, of course. Nice to speak with you again, Fred. We've been working together for now, I think, more than a year. So yeah, happy to be in the podcast. We have been also partnering with Motii for quite some time now. Well, just in a nutshell, Surfe was born as a LinkedIn Chrome extension connecting LinkedIn with CRMs. So it's Pipedrive, HubSpot, Salesforce, Copper. And then moved more broadly to the lead generation space. So allowing users to really build their outbound motion. So it's basically mainly for salespeople and sales teams. And now we are also seeing quite a lot of marketing and RevOps teams that are also starting to use us for different use cases, which is quite interesting. And you mentioned it before, my role is Head of Partnerships, so my goal is really to make referrals a predictable channel as well, which is also quite linked to the topic for today.
Fred Schnell: Very nice. Very good. And so before we dive into Surfe itself, right? In your experience working with sales teams all over the world really on a daily basis, when does a business usually realise that, you know, the personal relationships and the referrals simply aren't going to be enough anymore?
Marta El Bay: Referrals are great. So by the way, I just want to say it's great to have a good referral system because it means that you're doing something right. If your customers are referring you to other potential customers, it means you're doing your job right, so that's great. The main issue with that is scalability. So it's really difficult to scale a referral system. It's really difficult also to predict it. So, if you're a business and Fred, you know it better than me being a business owner, but if you need to plan your hiring, if you need to plan any funding, if you need to even just do the business plan year by year, it can be really difficult if your main channel is just referrals.
Fred Schnell: Absolutely.
Marta El Bay: So I think that's the point where businesses start to think, "Okay, maybe we should really understand how we are getting these referrals, where we are strong, and start to also look for customers." Also, there is—of course, referrals can be a great channel, but then you also hit a point where yeah, you just need to go out there and go outside of your network and really bring new businesses in. So I think it's in this moment of growth that this question really comes up of really how to build an outbound motion or even optimising inbound but just simply not relying on referrals anymore.
Fred Schnell: Yeah. And so do you think that businesses sometimes almost kind of avoid this outbound part of the business because, you know, referrals probably feel a lot safer and a lot more comfortable?
Marta El Bay: I think partially it is also like that. And it also goes back to resources. Like if you are a small business and you get some referrals, you know, it's great, you don't really have to think about outbound because then when you think about outbound, you need to think about a lot of other pieces. So it's quite a bit more of a complex puzzle. So it's not only about getting a tool, it's also hiring a person. So first actually it's hiring a person. But even before that is understanding who you're targeting, so who is your ideal customer profile. So there are a lot of pieces that then go with it. It's not just hiring one sales rep, getting a tool, and just start reaching out to people. It's really building a full strategy around that. So it really requires some commitment, dedication, and a sort of very scientific approach to sales.
Fred Schnell: Yeah, I know. And I guess the other thing is also outbound itself, sometimes I feel like gets a bit of a bad rep. Because, you know, people, including me, immediately kind of associate it with kind of that spammy or kind of more aggressive sales tactics that a lot of the cold callers have out there, right?
Marta El Bay: Yeah.
Fred Schnell: Now, at Motii we primarily work with growing small to medium-sized businesses and we implement sales tools including Surfe for clients on a regular basis. But when I look internally, right, honestly, like Motii is definitely not using Surfe anywhere near as much as we could probably use it, right. So I'm sure you're completely surprised by that... but no, seriously, is that something you see a lot?
Marta El Bay: Oh yeah, I see this definitely a lot. I see this also with ourselves. So I think for quite some time we didn't have the best usage of our tool as well. But truly that's another story. But definitely, I see this a lot with customers, partners... really funny also what—this is a case that we had recently with quite a big customer that provides sales trainings. And in general online trainings is really focused on enablement. And themselves internally, they had terrible, terrible training of their own team. So they were basically... not even like they didn't even know that they had Surfe, some of them. Some of them were using like partial features. Some others were still using some spreadsheets or like they were paying external tools. So it's one way to be, let's say, to sell a tool or sell some services and then it's a different story to implement those for yourselves. So I can say that we did this for also our customers. We helped them strategize their own sales process, optimise their usage of Surfe. And then us internally, we had issues with our CRM. We were mentioning CRM cleanup, helping migration, and then ourselves we were really bad at that and we struggled with it for I think at least two years.
Fred Schnell: Yeah. Wow. There you go. So let's dive into Surfe itself a little bit more, Marta. You mentioned you had your own struggles, right, with Surfe or implementing Surfe in-house and using it the proper way. Can you talk us through in a bit more detail: what was the gap, and what did you actually do to fix it?
Marta El Bay: Sure. So I think the main problem was that every team was basically setting up processes in a different way. And again, when we started we were a team of 20 and we were mostly based in Paris. So it's not the story of bigger companies with thousands of people, different teams. So it was really—it still is, but it was back then even more a small business. So this can happen to any small business. And some things that we did have—first like the sales team was on Pipedrive, then the marketing team was on HubSpot. So already there there was a gap. We said okay, we have two CRMs, why? Let's move all together. In the end we decided to move to HubSpot because the marketing team had already built basically a lot of their strategy on top of HubSpot. And for us we thought it was only about bringing the pipeline, bringing in the data, and then Surfe connects with both CRMs, so we didn't really think that the migration would be such an issue. And then we realised that the data was a mess because we had messy data on Pipedrive, we brought it to HubSpot, so of course it was the same story all over again. The sales reps were absolutely confused by all the data that was in HubSpot. So they started using their own spreadsheets. Then the marketing team... yeah I think maybe you've heard this story a lot. Adoption was really not on the table at the time. The marketing team had also their own flows, so with SEO, any marketing assets, ads, so everything was pushing leads to the CRM. And also the engineering team had developed something by which every time a user was creating a trial, we would have a contact saved in HubSpot. So now the problem was that all of these leads were coming with different details. Because the engineer, the way he developed the integration was, okay, someone creates a trial in Surfe, a contact is created in HubSpot, but the name is the email. And then the same person might come from the marketing team, but again, they had a different mapping. And then our sales team might add the same person using Surfe. And you know, Surfe is like a tool. So like if you have a mess in your CRM, it's not like Surfe doesn't do the magic. It needs to work within a set tool stack. You need to have processes. So if you have a fool with a tool, stays a fool. So it's kind of like Surfe doesn't really solve the problem if everything else is like a mess. So this was our situation. And then...
Fred Schnell: It's an interesting point, right? Because it's rarely kind of the technology problem itself, right? It's mostly the business knows the tools and it's more the processes themselves that don't really work, right?
Marta El Bay: Exactly. And it was just a matter of in the end communicating. So having a clear owner per team that would sit down and say, "Okay, this is what I built. This is what I'm doing. These are the tools that I'm using." And we did this process because we realised that no one was using the CRM and we were really spending a lot of money on it. So it was really about sitting down and connecting all of the teams and really it was actually with paper and pen trying to also just draw a simple flow, something that is where we could see at least the gaps, possibilities. And then we started also to look at the tools that we were using. So we had bought a very expensive sequencing tool, and then we realised, "Oh, there is actually the same in HubSpot. So why are we paying twice for the same thing?" We also had another enrichment provider, despite us being an enrichment provider... which someone bought at some point but it was also pushing data. So like, the first thing, what I want to say by explaining this mess is that sometimes it's really a lack of communication, a lack of thinking before doing. Because also migration is not a simple migration of data from one CRM to the other. You want to make sure that you're not dragging the same problems because then it can affect the performance of other tools that you have on top. So Surfe is not a deduplication tool. It's a lead generation tool. It's an accelerator of the strategy, but if you have a lot of duplication in your CRM, if you don't have a strategy behind it, it's not going to help. So for us it was also then there was also a problem of knowing who we are going after. We didn't have a really clear idea of our target, or our ICP. So we were basically reaching out to everyone. But when you reach out to everyone, you don't speak with anyone at the end of the day. So it was really not targeting our efforts. We were really scattered across different platforms, across different geographies, and industries. And then it was really a work that took two years and we're still trying to refine it. But now we are in a better place than we were two years ago.
Fred Schnell: I think, you know, you bring up a good point. I mean you just mentioned, right, two years was the journey that it took you to get to where you are today. And I think a lot of businesses know these tools are out there and maybe they even have the tools, right? And they probably also know that they should be doing and looking at more outbound and spending more time and effort into outbound. And still, there just seems to be a hesitation or a gap between being aware that it should actually happen and building the process and the structure and the habit internally to actually get it done, right? So why do you think there is such a disconnect between knowing the importance of doing outbounds, knowing that tools like Surfe are available, and then actually going ahead and doing it?
Marta El Bay: I think it's a matter of prioritisation. So we know the tools exist. We know that looking for customers is important. But then a lot of businesses—I mean we have done this, I'm pretty sure that every small business has done that in the past or is doing that right now—is prioritising for instance revenue and customers against improving their internal operations. Because I think okay, we need clients, we need more revenue, we need more projects. And this makes sense because we need to build revenue. But then on the long term, it can actually make you lose money. So a calculation that I always do when I talk about an ROI with partners or their customers is: So you have a sales rep. How much are you paying? So if I'm thinking, taking the example I was reading before... I think in Australia the hourly average is 43, between 43 and 46 dollars per hour in the cities for a sales rep. So I say, okay, if we are taking your hourly rate for your sales rep, how many hours is he now spending on manually entering the data? Like manually doing certain tasks. So we're going back to the time and say, okay, if it's five hours per week. Okay, if I'm taking like let's say 43 dollars as an hourly rate, per 5, I have 215. So now 215 per week, dollars that you spend on tasks that you're not optimising. Now let's say that if we're looking at this on a monthly base, you have 860 dollars spending on manual work that is not generating any revenue, it's just admin tasks. Now if you hire another person, so if you have two sales reps because they are not productive, they are not optimising their productivity. If we're looking at this, you're doubling the expense, so you're basically spending 1,720 dollars... for what? And so on, and so on. And then you keep hiring and you keep losing money. And then you need to make more revenue on the side, but then it's always running after money that you're losing behind as well.
Fred Schnell: Yeah, I think, and that kind of goes back to a very important point that I always say, is technology should not be a cost or not be seen as a cost to the business, it should actually be seen as an investment into the business, right? So if you think about, okay, so how much time does a sales rep in your example right, how much does a sales rep actually spend in just research and entering data and updating data and everything else, versus what the tool that costs you a few dollars a month, for example, can do to automate all of that. So you put these two things into a balance and you see well, actually that's money well spent, it's an investment into the business to optimise the business process. Now, you mentioned that there's a lot involved in getting that outbound right. At the same time, do you think that businesses sometimes just overcomplicate outbound and just kind of put it into that "Ah, it's too hard" kind of basket?
Marta El Bay: Yeah, I think the real partly is also like this, overcomplicating, I think it is. It makes sense because right now we hear a lot of AI and all of these RevOps, engineers on LinkedIn sharing these complex workflows on Clay, n8n, or Make, any automation tools. So I have to be honest, when I look at all of this content and all of these hacks, it really seems complicated to me as well. So I understand that it's demotivating because right now AI is the hype. So everything we have the perception that everything needs to be done with AI. While sometimes just outbound can start really simple. So really just by knowing who your service is and who your product is serving. So not speaking, like we were saying this before, you're not speaking with everyone, with every potential company. So you might have, even if you take the referrals, you might see some patterns. So I would always start from the referral. The first thing is okay, what are these referrals like? Are they small businesses? Are they more in a certain industry? What do they have in common? So starting from those referrals and those customers that you already closed, you can draft your ideal customer profile and say okay, I see I have success with this group of companies. So I might then look for similar companies. And then you can also refer previous customers. So outbound can be as easy as that. So even right now I'm not even mentioning any sequencing or any cleansing tool, just simply drafting who you're talking to and then you know you have already a starting point, so know who to target after. So it can be as simple as that without Claude or any AI tools. So just looking at what you have already.
Fred Schnell: I think you brought up an interesting point because a lot of business owners or even Head of Sales or Head of Marketing, whoever you talk to, a lot of times when you ask, "So who's your target audience? Who's your ideal client?" "Ah, we service everyone." And I think it's back to your point, right? It's kind of okay, so let's define who your target market really is to then, because that makes it a lot more easy, what kind of messaging you get across and everything else, right? So Marta, let's make it a little bit more practical, right? For a business that has mostly grown through referrals, word of mouth, and that has never really done any kind of structured outbound. What can Surfe change in the day-to-day prospecting process?
Marta El Bay: Yeah, I would say there are different levels also on how to use Surfe like with different features, options. And what I always bring is my example or also how I ramped up with the tool. So I can give also this like my sort of playbook if we can call it in this way, so that it can be an inspiration for some of the people listening to us.
Fred Schnell: I'm sure there will be a lot of people interested in that.
Marta El Bay: And yeah, definitely. So I was mentioning before bringing my example like I'm a partnership person, so I'm targeting mainly solution consulting companies that work with CRMs that we integrate with. So of course Pipedrive, HubSpot, etc. So what I started like, as I started was just looking at like the Pipedrive marketplace or the Pipedrive announcements. And for instance like the Pipedrive partner awards like when they were posting on LinkedIn and then just going there like I was just on the simple LinkedIn, no Sales Navigator, nothing. I was just going into the company, checking if, like for instance for Motii, like say, okay, is Motii interesting for me? Do we have a fit? I was looking at you guys on LinkedIn and said okay, I think there is a fit. So I was just using Surfe to add Motii to my CRM. Then I was going into the people tab and I wanted, normally I speak mainly with owners, founders, directors. So I was using this, just on the search bar I was just looking for "who is the managing director?" And at the time it was Ben. So I said okay, I will add Ben. So I just always use Surfe, with one click I could add him, and what Surfe does also which is really really helpful is giving you the email and the mobile. So we do have an enrichment built in. So I could not only add Ben's profile directly from LinkedIn to my CRM without having to copy-paste because if not it would have been a lot of time. But also it gives me the contact information. So then I know that I can reach out on LinkedIn, but I also have the other information if I want to give him a call for instance or send him an email. So this is like really what I was doing. So it was still very manual just looking at the marketplaces and see okay, they have this new partner, so I will look on LinkedIn if it's a good fit as well, and then I will add them to my CRM. And already it was very good to have all of the contact information because I really like to do multi-channel. So you know, if I send an email you can easily ignore me like in the noise of the email, but then if I also reach out on LinkedIn, not always with the same message of course but really adapting my outreach to the channel, there is a higher chance that then I get a response. So this is what I was doing like at start. And then when I started to have more partners... so I got you guys, Motii, I got other Pipedrive partners for instance. I said okay, now I do have an idea of what works. So I saw that I was working very well with partners that had up to 50 employees. And I was doing not so well with partners that have bigger organisations. So I said okay, I will focus my energy directly on this segment. And I used Surfe like more of the—we have this lead generation part, which is more of a mass lead builder, very similar to Sales Navigator if you want to have a comparison. But I was just putting in as a lookalike filter, like Motii, Flowbird, and BLC, the partners that I signed. I said okay, these are the partners. I want them to be, I put as keywords "Pipedrive", because I wanted to also develop the Pipedrive ecosystem, and I said okay, in the industry it's going to be consulting and implementation because this is what you guys are doing. And then I was generating this list of lookalikes of your company, so other consulting agencies implementing CRMs, mainly Pipedrive. I said okay, there is a fit there. So I was basically just looking at the same people in bulk, like managers, directors, etc, and then adding them in bulk to my CRM with all the information of course because we also always run enrichment. And since I am, I have to say I am very bad at following up, what I did also was using some automations to make sure that I had tasks booked, like tasks planned already every day. So I know every time I was adding a contact, there was a set of tasks that was automatically created for me so I knew that I had to follow through.
Fred Schnell: Perfect. Very nice. Yeah. And I think, you know, you mentioned the data enrichment like phones and emails and whatnot, and when I looked at Surfe, the one thing that really stood out for me was, and was interesting, was the fact that compared to other sources in the marketplace, you're not saying you're a database. You describe yourselves as an aggregator pulling from multiple data sources. Can you explain a little bit more in plain English what do you mean by that?
Marta El Bay: Yeah, sure. So we know there are a lot of tools in this space. Like when we hear about enrichment, we hear Apollo, ZoomInfo, like most of these tools they are one database. So it's a fixed database. It can get upgraded or updated once every one, two years or more depending on their strategy, but normally it's one single database. So if you're using one of these tools, if the contact that you are enriching is not in those databases, well, it's just not going to work. So you're not going to find any contact information. This is something that we realised at Surfe. So the very first idea of Surfe was to build a database. And then we realised that it would take an incredible amount of time to just build a real complex, complete, accurate database. But also we could never cover different geographies, different industries fully. Because every tool works very well in certain geographies, but not so well in others. So we decided to abandon this project of building a database or just having it in the back of our minds but not really as a priority, and start aggregating different tools. So we know for instance there are tools that are very strong, like Kaspr is very strong in France. Okay, that's a tool that we can integrate. There is Prospeo, really good in mobile phones in Europe. Okay, this is a tool that we take. So we just picked different tools, we benchmarked them to see okay, are they really good, are they giving us good results across different markets and industries? Yes. So let's aggregate them. So we basically have now what we call the waterfall. So basically when you enrich a contact, we just run through each tool to see if they have the right information and then we verify it.
Fred Schnell: And you can actually see this when you're searching on LinkedIn. You can see all the databases that you're actually going through to find the data, right?
Marta El Bay: Yeah, exactly. And we keep changing them, like it depends on their quality, on their performance. And we change also the order in the cascade. But yeah, the user doesn't really have to do anything. So they just look at the waterfall working and then we take care of all the optimization and really making sure the providers are always up to the quality that we set for them.
Fred Schnell: Gotcha. Now, connecting the dots a little bit more with Motii. And for all the Pipedrive and Monday users out there listening. How does Surfe connect into my CRM? You mentioned that it's one click and then—but how does it actually connect?
Marta El Bay: So the connection is mainly because it takes like 30 seconds to just download a Chrome extension and then connect your CRM and it's done. So it's really, really easy to connect. And the idea, the best way to see Surfe, Pipedrive is basically the receiver of all the data. So basically when you're on LinkedIn, yeah, you just click, you add contacts and those contacts are saved in Pipedrive. And as a setup, also this is very simple because you just need to do some mapping because there are some properties that we bring in from LinkedIn that you might want or that you might not want. Like the past working experience, the languages, or we also do a summary of the profile. So you might want that data, and then you need to make sure that you have the corresponding fields on Pipedrive so you know that your information is falling exactly where you're expecting it. Especially if you're running some automations or anything on top of it. But the connection is really simple and then once you have it, it's really an intuitive tool in the sense that it's quite simple to just sync contacts. The enrichment normally starts, is triggered automatically. So with one click you get the contact in Pipedrive with all the information without having to do much else. And then from LinkedIn, you can always add notes or plan tasks. As I was saying, I'm a big fan of tasks, so also when I'm prospecting on LinkedIn then I'm always making sure to have a task planned for next steps, or also adding some notes if I see anything interesting on the profile and then everything is synced back to Pipedrive.
Fred Schnell: Beautiful. I know, I know it's really intuitive, it's super easy to use. Now, if we just think about a business owner listening who kind of recognises, "Okay, this is a gap in my business," and he or she would like to address this upfront. And maybe still feels a bit overwhelmed by it all, by the idea of doing some outbound. In your view, what are the baby steps or what are the first useful steps to take?
Marta El Bay: Yeah, I would say like already I was mentioning before AI. Don't even think about AI. Don't think that AI is fundamental to get started. So already take that away, first think about your own business and what you've already done. And I always recommend having more of a scientific approach to sales or a scientific mindset to sales, which is also quite hard for me, being Italian we are very passionate and we're like, "Oh yeah let's do this," but no, being very very logical, very analytical about your business. And looking at okay, who we have had successes with in the past? What is the goal, but also overall what is our business goal? So if your goal is growing internationally versus growing more locally, then you have two different strategies. And it can still change because you might decide to focus locally at first and then to grow internationally. That's fine. But you need to understand, "Okay, this is my business overall, this is my business goal, where I want to go." And then really break this down into small pieces. So okay, who I want to talk to? Who can benefit from my services? Okay, what is the TAM, like the total addressable market for this sector? So you can also think about resources. If you have, if there are thousands of companies, you might need further down the line, you might need hiring. So imagine also like if you're selling then also more complex products or services, you might need different roles. So it's really about planning this. And then thinking about okay, if I have to hire my first sales rep, or other sales reps, what are the steps I need to take to make them successful? What I want them to do, who they should talk to? Because for us it was a problem where our sales reps were selling one-license deals. But we were not telling them what to sell. So like, it's setting them up for success, right?
Fred Schnell: Make sense. Set them up for success, right? Yeah.
Marta El Bay: Exactly. We're not telling them like, go after bigger accounts, go after teams that have multiple sales reps because then you can have more substantial deals. We were not really training them. But also because we didn't know who we were targeting. We didn't know what our sweet spot was. So we hired sales reps before actually knowing how to make them successful. That's what I would say, it's really having this sort of scientific approach to sales and to build outbound without even thinking about tools at first. And tools come later. It's more about the strategy.
Fred Schnell: Love it, love it. For me, I think winning work with referrals and word of mouth, I think it's a great sign that someone's built a very good and trusted business, right? And so I also think that if you want to grow beyond that and with more control, you will eventually need to find a system and create a system that actively creates opportunities and not just you sitting there waiting for leads to land in your lap.
Marta El Bay: Yeah. And also more opportunities will bring more referrals as well. So one channel grows the other.
Fred Schnell: Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. Marta, look, thank you so much for joining us today. I really enjoyed our conversation. Now, for anyone listening, please head to motii.co/playbook. You can learn everything about Surfe, how it can fit in your connected sales setup. And please don't hesitate to reach out to the Motii team if you have any questions, or if you would like to discuss what a good setup could look like for you. Now, thank you so much for listening and we'll see you in the next one. Thank you Marta.
Marta El Bay: Thank you Fred.
Outro: That's it for another episode of the Motii Playbook. One shift, one system, one measurable improvement. All information shared in this podcast is general in nature. For tailored advice specific to your business, visit motii.co/playbook and book a momentum call with our team. See you next time.
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