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How Cascade Energy increased revenue by 150% and scaled to 100+ users with Pipedrive

Based in the US, Cascade Energy helps utility customers, corporations and governments reduce their energy waste by lowering emissions and improving operational efficiency. The company works within a wide range of industries including industrial manufacturing, agriculture, water and wastewater facilities, and commercial buildings.

“Our unique strength comes from combining deep industrial and commercial experience with energy management programs and a software platform that help deliver measurable and long-term energy cost savings.” – Patrick Robinson, Business Analyst, Cascade Energy

  • Industries: Consultancy, Sustainability, Engineering, Software Solutions
  • Location: Portland, Oregon
  • Key features: Insights & Custom Reporting, Deals & Pipeline Management, Web Forms & LeadBooster, Workflow Automation
Cascade Energy Pipedrive Case Study

150%

Revenue growth since 2018, when Pipedrive was implemented

133

Pipedrive seats currently, up from 40 initially

82

Active Pipedrive automations

Why Pipedrive aligned with Cascade Energy’s efficiency-first approach

If you’re in the business of helping others to become more efficient and cut costs, having your own house in order is essential. This principle led to Cascade Energy adopting Pipedrive’s intuitive, cost-effective and easy-to-scale CRM in 2018.

Cascade supports utilities with energy efficiency program management and works directly with both large and small energy-using facilities. Most of its employees are in Portland, Oregon, but it also has large offices in Utah, Chicago and southern California. Its engineers, scattered across the US, deploy on-site support to customers who are ready to conserve energy and decarbonize.

Cascade’s use of Pipedrive is a testament to the fact that, no matter the speed or volume of your company’s expansion, having the right CRM in place makes scaling up easy. Initially, the company had 40 Pipedrive seats, and this has now expanded to 133.

Prior to 2018, sales were managed using Salesforce – but this proved to be too expensive and needlessly complex for the level of capability the business required. Pipedrive stood out as the most cost-effective, intuitive and easily scalable solution. Particularly attractive to Cascade Energy were the ease of importing, the customization options and the Insights reporting functionality.

Our prior CRM was very expensive to use and required a large amount of backend development and extra capabilities. It felt like we weren’t using it to the level that the cost was at.
For the team at the time, it was just too much administrative work and a lot of development effort. There’s a high bar for learning compared to Pipedrive, which has a much more intuitive interface and is easy to pick up. So, the team evaluated several CRM options and narrowed it down to two finalists – Insightly and Pipedrive – and ultimately Pipedrive felt like the right fit in terms of both features and price point.
We’re now able to onboard people relatively quickly. In contrast, tools like Salesforce can require a much longer onboarding process, especially for people who aren’t already familiar with the system.
We’ve upgraded twice. Around 2021, we moved from the Basic to the Advanced plan, and in 2025 we switched from Advanced to the new Premium plan. The main driver was access to more advanced Insights reporting, particularly around custom fields. Those improvements have made a big difference in terms of how we track metrics and manage our teams effectively.
PR

Patrick RobinsonBusiness Analyst, Cascade Energy

Cascade Energy Team

How Pipedrive’s Deals feature has energized day-to-day operations

Cascade uses Pipedrive in a way that reflects how its business actually functions. Rather than treating the CRM as a traditional sales tool, the company has adapted it to manage numerous activities across its business functions. At the center of this is the Deals feature, which provides a single place to track everything – from sales to program recruitment and partner relationships to long-term program delivery.

Capturing new opportunities is equally seamless. Using Web Forms and the LeadBooster add-on, teams can easily submit leads – be they from events or day-to-day interactions. Every lead enters Pipedrive in a consistent way, making it easy to review, assign and move forward on new opportunities.

By bringing all its information into one system, Cascade has created a clear and connected way of collaborating. It all means different teams can contribute to a shared customer relationship without losing sight of what’s happening across the business.

Different teams are using the Deals feature for recruitment into our energy efficiency programs, for managing vendor relationships and even for longer-term account management. It gives us one place to track all of that, even when it’s not tied to a direct revenue opportunity.
With Web Forms, we’ve got a consistent way for all our customer-facing teams to pass along potential leads and opportunities. Everything comes into Pipedrive, and from there the sales team can review it and decide what to do next.
For events, we set up specific Web Forms pertaining to each event we attend, so we can track exactly where each lead has come from. We also use Web Forms across multiple websites – so whether it’s inbound or from an event, it all feeds into the same system.
Before, leads were coming in through different channels and weren’t always being captured. Now, with Pipedrive and LeadBooster, everything has to go into the CRM, which makes it much easier to keep track of what’s being worked on.
JM

Josh MonifiCustomer Engagement Operations Manager, Cascade Energy

Specific Pipedrive features and how Cascade Energy uses them

Here is the main CRM functionality adopted by the company:

Insights & custom field reporting

Used to report on custom fields across multiple sales efforts and programs. Teams build and share dashboards using best-practice templates without exporting data to external tools.

“Team feedback on our Insights reporting is very promising.” – Patrick Robinson, Business Analyst

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Deals & pipeline management

Adapted beyond sales to track recruitment pipelines, vendor relationships and long-term account management.

“We use the Deals feature for a lot more than just sales, keeping everyone on the same page about what is going on with each contact.” – Patrick Robinson, Business Analyst

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Web Forms & LeadBooster

Deployed across websites, events and internal teams to capture and route leads into Pipedrive CRM.

“Web Forms have allowed us to collect leads from the hundreds of people that are customer-facing across the company.” – Patrick Robinson, Business Analyst

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Workflow automation

Used to trigger tasks, notifications and custom field updates as deals progress.

“In the past 18 months in particular, we’ve expanded Automations into lots of different areas, improving our customer history and notifications to staff on deal progress." – Patrick Robinson, Business Analyst

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How customized data, automation and integrations power workflows

Cascade has tweaked Pipedrive to match its natural structure, rather than forcing its teams into a rigid system. The company has configured the platform to handle the complexity of operational programs, capturing different types of information across deals, organizations and people in the most useful ways.

This flexibility shines through in how data is structured and used. Custom fields enable teams to record the details that really matter, while a more standardized approach to recruitment pipeline stages helps everyone understand how work is progressing. With access to Insights reporting (available on Premium and Ultimate plans), teams can explore this information directly within Pipedrive – its dashboards and shared views help keep everything aligned.

Pipedrive is key to how teams communicate and stay organized. Email sync links conversations to the work they relate to, and shared templates help outreach stay timely and on brand. Teams also log activities to build a clear picture of customer interactions over time – information that can be revisited or analyzed when needed.

Automations and integrations ensure things run smoothly behind the scenes: tasks and updates are triggered automatically as work moves forward, while tools including Zapier, Mailchimp, Monday and SharePoint are connected through integrations.

We have a lot of different custom fields that we utilize – things like revenue profile, contract length and contract duration. There’s also a lot of information we track on the organization side, like their goals, utilities and energy-using systems.
Over the past year, we’ve been rolling out a more standardized set of stages for our program recruitment efforts. Before, different programs had their own stages, but now it’s more consistent. So, if someone looks at a pipeline, it’s easier to understand what’s going on.
We’re utilizing automations to notify deal owners or specialists when something happens – like when a deal progresses to a certain stage – and to trigger activities. We’ve also been expanding this by using automations to assign activities to folks, prompting them to fill in specific fields when deals reach certain stages or dates.
Zapier is one of our biggest integrations. If there’s something we can’t automate within Pipedrive, we’ll try to do it through Zapier – bringing in contacts from other systems, updating records in SharePoint or connecting with tools like Monday.
PR

Patrick RobinsonBusiness Analyst, Cascade Energy

Pipedrive CRM’s role in boosting performance across the business

With Pipedrive on board, Cascade has brought clarity and coordination to its operations. Sales, recruitment and program teams are now united inside a shared system, making it easier to collaborate and maintain visibility across activities that were previously cumbersome and opaque. This visibility also supports more strategic outreach, helping teams identify connections between organizations and grow existing relationships.

Additionally, the CRM has become an authoritative source of truth for customer and operational data. By capturing detailed information across deals, organizations and activities, the company has amassed a comprehensive record of its work – which its teams can draw on when developing proposals, tracking program performance or identifying leads.

Since implementing Pipedrive, Cascade has grown significantly, increasing revenue by 150% and expanding from 40 users to 133. Furthermore, their Leads Inbox now contains a sizable number of leads – around 1,000 in total.

Pipedrive has definitely helped with collaboration between our teams. You’ve got sales teams and recruitment teams all working on the same thing, and now it’s all in one place instead of spread across multiple Excel sheets or other tools.
Now that we’ve put all this customer history into Pipedrive, it’s become our best resource for answering questions like what kind of work we’ve done in a certain industry or with a specific type of facility.
We’re building relationships with hundreds of facilities, and Pipedrive lets us see the full history – what’s been done, what conversations have happened… that’s really powerful.
We’re able to ‘weave connections’ between organizations – seeing where we’ve worked with one site and using that to engage another. That’s been really useful for how we approach outreach.
Since around 2021, we’ve had a Pipedrive customer success specialist assigned to us. They’ve really advocated for us – connecting us with engineers, helping us find solutions and taking our feedback to the Pipedrive team. We’ve worked with a few over time, but we’ve had our current specialist for over two years now, and it’s been a really great relationship. Having that level of support has made a big difference for us.
JM

Josh MonifiCustomer Engagement Operations Manager, Cascade Energy

Cascade Energy Kress Tour

Final thoughts

Cascade Energy continues to tap into more of what Pipedrive has to offer. Features including email sync, Prospector and chatbot functionality are also being adopted to varying degrees, while integrations help connect the CRM to the rest of its tech stack. As teams adopt new tools and refine their processes, Pipedrive becomes ever more embedded into how the business operates.

Pipedrive is a really collaborative tool that has certainly had an impact on how organized we are and how successful our programs continue to be.
JM

Josh MonifiCustomer Engagement Operations Manager, Cascade Energy

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