The recognition points to a shift underway in the CRM category, as growing sales teams move away from platforms that simply record activity in favor of tools that actively help them move deals forward.
New York, August 6, 2026 - Pipedrive, the easy and intelligent CRM for small and medium-sized businesses, has been named SMB CRM Solution of the Year in the 2026 MarTech Breakthrough Awards, a global recognition program now in its ninth year that evaluates marketing, sales and advertising technology companies.
The recognition comes as growing sales teams face a similar challenge: finding technology sophisticated enough to support their growth without introducing unnecessary complexity. Pipedrive addresses this by combining intuitive pipeline management with automation and AI-powered capabilities that help teams prioritize opportunities, reduce administrative work and keep deals moving.
"The marketing technology ecosystem continues to expand at a remarkable pace, with new categories and capabilities emerging to meet the demands of an increasingly complex digital landscape," said Steve Johansson, Managing Director at MarTech Breakthrough. "From agentic AI platforms that are redefining campaign automation to answer engine optimization solutions that are helping brands navigate the new reality of AI driven search, this year's MarTech Breakthrough Award winners represent the most significant advances in marketing technology today. We are proud to recognize these outstanding companies and solutions for their breakthrough contributions to the industry."
“For growing sales teams, sophistication shouldn’t come at the expense of simplicity,” said Joe Futty, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Pipedrive. “As businesses grow, their sales processes naturally become more complex, but their CRM shouldn’t add to that complexity. Its job is to absorb it, bringing the right information forward, taking repetitive work off people’s plates and helping teams understand where their attention will have the greatest impact. AI gives us an opportunity to take that principle much further, moving CRM from a system people have to maintain toward one that actively helps them sell. Being named SMB CRM Solution of the Year is meaningful because it recognizes the value of building powerful technology around the realities of growing businesses, rather than asking those businesses to work around the technology.”
The real-world impact of Pipedrive’s friction-free design speaks for itself. On average, Pipedrive users report a 47% reduction in time-to-close, alongside a 20% increase in average deal value and a 2.7x jump in overall win rates. For new customers, the platform also drives an 86% increase in pipeline generation in year one alone. To keep pushing these numbers higher, Pipedrive has heavily invested in AI, automation and sales intelligence suites over the past year, ensuring that as a business scales, its reps spend less time managing software and more time managing relationships.
The MarTech Breakthrough Awards program is run by Tech Breakthrough, a market intelligence and recognition organization for global technology innovation. The 2026 MarTech Breakthrough Awards program drew thousands of nominations from companies in more than 15 countries, spanning categories from agentic AI and answer engine optimization to CRM and sales enablement.
Read more about 2026 winners here.
About Pipedrive
Founded in 2010, Pipedrive is the easy, intelligent CRM loved by growing sales teams at small and medium-sized businesses. Intuitive by design, the platform gives businesses complete visibility into their sales pipeline and acts as a single, trusted source for customer and deal data. Pipedrive operates like a virtual team behind every salesperson by automating manual workflows, recommending next-best actions and keeping deals moving. Today, more than 105,000 companies across 180+ countries use Pipedrive to accelerate growth. Headquartered in New York, the company is backed by the majority shareholder, Vista Equity Partners, alongside other leading global technology investors. Learn more at www.pipedrive.com.
About the MarTech Breakthrough Awards
Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the MarTech Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring excellence in marketing, ad and sales technology companies, products and people. The MarTech Breakthrough Awards provide a platform for public recognition around the achievements of breakthrough marketing technology companies and products in categories including marketing automation, AdTech, SalesTech, marketing analytics, performance marketing, CRM, content and social marketing, website, SEM, mobile marketing and more. For more information, visit MarTechBreakthrough.com.
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