Zendesk Sell is Shutting Down
Your complete guide to migrating to Pipedrive—without the $10,000 price tag.
In September 2024, Zendesk announced that Zendesk Sell will permanently shut down on August 31, 2027. All customer data will be deleted unless migrated to a new platform.
If you're a Zendesk Sell user, you've probably already received the email. After years of managing your sales pipeline on the platform, Zendesk has decided to exit the CRM business entirely and focus on customer service. While the shutdown is still a couple years away, waiting isn't an option—especially when you consider what's at stake.
Here’s what you should know about this transition and how a Zendesk migration consultant service can help.
What’s Happening at Zendesk
After many attempts to improve and expand their sales CRM solution, Zendesk has decided to center themselves around their core customer service offerings.
With automation bringing new possibilities to the nature of work, they envision a future where they are able to completely transform customer and employee services. They aim to focus on the exceptional delivery of these services, bringing together an automated, proactive, and highly personalized CX that will revolutionize the way business teams interact with their customers.
This realignment of their center means that some things have to give. In this case, that means retiring Zendesk Sell, its sales CRM solution. Zendesk plans to fully shutdown Sell by August 31, 2027. This timespan of two years is meant to provide Zendesk customers the time needed to address this change, including:
- Exporting your data from Zendesk Sell
- Exploring other sales CRM solutions
- Contacting Zendesk for any questions
Customers will still be able to maintain full access to Zendesk’s Sell product until the shutdown date. To see Zendesk’s full announcement, you can read their recent help article.
What This Means for Your Business
To make things simple for their customers, Zendesk has partnered with Pipedrive as their official migration solution. Pipedrive is a CRM solution that’s known for helping teams manage leads and close more deals. As a platform, it’s purpose-built for sales teams, offers robust automation, and has proven migration tools to handle the technical heavy lifting.
Why Zendesk Chose Pipedrive
When Zendesk had to pick a migration partner, they didn't go with the obvious big names. Here's why Pipedrive made sense:
Similar DNA
New systems can be off-putting to sales teams, which in turn can lead to errors and stalled adoption. Fortunately in this case, both platforms were built for sales teams first, not retrofitted from marketing or support tools. Zendesk Sell users won't feel lost. Pipedrive's visual pipeline and deal-centric approach mirrors what you already know. The learning curve is minimal, which matters when you're migrating an entire team.
Proven Migration Infrastructure
There are many unknowns when it comes to new systems, including their behavior, hidden issues, and whether they will actually meet your business’ needs. With Pipedrive, you aren’t playing a guessing game.
Pipedrive has dedicated APIs and data mapping tools specifically designed for CRM migrations. They've handled thousands of transitions from legacy systems, which means fewer headaches with custom fields, deal stages, and historical data. Zendesk vetted the technical feasibility before making the recommendation.
Pricing That Scales With SMBs
Many Zendesk Sell customers are small to mid-sized teams. Pipedrive's pricing structure, which starts at $14/user/month and scales up to $79/user/month—depending on the plan you select—aligns with that reality.1
No Vendor Lock-In Drama
Becoming overly dependent on one vendor’s proprietary tools can make switching to a new tool both difficult and expensive. Pipedrive doesn't force you into a massive ecosystem or punish you for not buying additional products. You get a focused sales tool that integrates cleanly with your existing tech stack.
Beyond this, Pipedrive is a great alternative solution as it's already a well-established Zendesk integration. This collaborative history ensures connected sales and support workflows. Other benefits of going with Pipedrive include:
- Visualizing pipelines, qualifying leads, and nurturing relationships.
- Keeping contacts, activities, and calendar events in sync.
- Access to real-time dashboards, custom reports, and AI-powered report generation and email summarization.
- A powerful mobile app, robust open API, and a marketplace with 500+ integrations.
The Reality of Migration Costs
Here's what most companies are facing when migrating from Zendesk Sell to Pipedrive:
- Data mapping and field customization: Ensuring your custom fields, workflows, and deal stages transfer correctly, and avoiding compatibility and schema mismatches.
- Historical data preservation: Saving activities, emails, call logs, and documents that Zendesk's native export doesn't capture.
- Integration reconfiguration: Reconnecting your tech stack to work seamlessly with Pipedrive.
- Team training and adoption: Getting your sales reps up to speed without disrupting business and losing productivity.
In navigating these tasks, migration processes often exceed budget and time.
Why Start Planning Now?
August 2027 might seem a ways away, but here's the reality: companies that wait until six months before Zendesk Sell shuts down will face rushed migrations, data loss risks, and overwhelmed migration partners. Starting early gives you:
- Time to plan properly: Map your processes and customize Pipedrive to match your workflow.
- Gradual team adoption: Train users in phases without disrupting daily operations.
- Data preservation: Ensure nothing gets lost in the transition.
- Strategic improvements: Use migration as an opportunity to optimize your sales process.
ShadowRock's Migration Commitment
As certified partners of both Zendesk and Pipedrive, we've been helping businesses navigate CRM transitions for many years. When Zendesk announced the Sell shutdown, we made a decision: we're offering free migrations to Pipedrive for all Zendesk Sell customers.
We believe that migration shouldn't come with a five-figure bill. Our solution aims to seamlessly transfer data, settings, and automations from Zendesk to Pipedrive at no extra cost to you. The process itself is engineered to cut the complexity, making it so migration isn’t the costly, time-consuming project it could be.
Migrating with us means:
- Complete data migration: This is a comprehensive transfer of contacts, deals, and metadata. Everything from tasks to smart lists and customer fields are migrated and matched to their Pipedrive counterparts.
- Field mapping and workflow configuration: Our migration process maps all core data and settings, as well as automations.
- Integration setup and testing: Most migrations are completed within a few hours time, and data security is guaranteed with encrypted data transfer and no data storage afterwards.
- User training and onboarding support: We offer meetings with Migration Experts for guidance and to answer questions.
Zero migration fees. No hidden costs. Just a smooth transition.
Sources
- Pipedrive (2026, February 19) - Pricing - Pipedrive.com
Ready to Make the Move?
Schedule a free migration consultation from our team. We'll walk you through the process, answer your questions, and get your migration on the calendar—at no cost to you.
