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Having accomplished significant internships at Google and Intuit, Dominic Allon honed his leadership style by accepting feedback, learning from failure, and continuously difficult himself. His role at Google was transformative, leading projects that modified the way agencies and firms used digital promoting. At Intuit, he focused more on customer-centric innovation, understanding the importance of making tools that solve real problems.
Allon is currently the CEO Pipedrivebut attending to this position wasn’t just about accumulating experience at big tech firms. It was about learning the nuances of leadership – how you can balance ambition with empathy, how you can accept difficult feedback, and how you can continually develop the self-awareness vital to guide a team in the ever-evolving technology industry. We talked about all this and more during this episode Founder CEO.
Takeover of a company run by the founder
When Allon took over as CEO of Pipedrive in 2021, he was faced with the challenge of honoring the legacy of the five founders who built Pipedrive from the ground up. “The founders created something special,” he recalls. “Their vision has redefined the way sellers manage and track transaction flow.”
Instead of trying to alter all the things, Allon selected a sustainable approach: honoring the founders’ legacy by creating the next chapter of Pipedrive’s development. Before making any strategic changes, he focused on understanding the company’s core strengths, products and culture. This well-thought-out transition laid the foundations for his future company development plans.
Development and innovation
Under Allon’s leadership, Pipedrive continued to attain success. One of the primary changes Allon introduced was a greater focus on artificial intelligence. For example, AI now routinely generates leads and emails, saving you time. Allon’s vision is to rework Pipedrive from simply tracking deals to actively driving sales success through AI insights. The recently introduced AI feature, Pulse, helps sellers discover the hottest prospects in their pipelines, allowing them to simply prioritize high-value activities. Allon’s vision for Pipedrive is clear: to rework it from a deal tracking tool to one that actively drives sales success through AI-powered insights.
As Allon says, “AI is not just a co-pilot — it becomes the primary pilot.” His focus on automation has put Pipedrive ahead of the curve by increasing CRM efficiency and freeing salespeople to focus on what they do best: closing deals.
Pipedrive’s human focus
What really sets Pipedrive apart is its commitment to its users – the sellers. Since its inception, Pipedrive has been generally known as the most user-friendly CRM on the market, and Allon has only cemented that popularity. By integrating advanced technologies similar to artificial intelligence, the company has not overlooked its mission: simplifying the sales process for small and medium-sized businesses.
This human-centric approach combined with cutting-edge technology has led to Pipedrive’s continuous development. Allona’s leadership has seen the company expand its global reach while maintaining its identity as a CRM system built with sellers in mind. “We want to be the best in the world at helping small businesses grow,” says Allon, and his strategic vision has aligned every a part of Pipedrive’s development to that goal.
Making plans for the future
With AI taking center stage, Allon’s next chapter for Pipedrive involves scaling AI-based tools and making them much more intuitive for users. Its goal is to maneuver from automating easy tasks to providing deeper insights that enable sales teams to more easily make data-driven decisions. Beyond AI, Allon is also focused on expanding Pipedrive’s reach globally, reaching latest markets while deepening customer engagement in existing ones.
However, as Pipedrive grows, Allon stays committed to maintaining the company’s core values. “It’s important that we don’t lose what made us great.”
Allon’s journey offers a powerful lesson to aspiring entrepreneurs and leaders: growth is not only about achieving success, but about consistently growing, accepting feedback, and having the courage to alter things when needed. As he says, “Successful leaders are a combination of their innate strengths and a set of learned behaviors,” and Dominic Allon has mastered each to guide Pipedrive into its next great chapter.