We are creating a new category in the sales technology industry: the Sales Suite.
Wrong Approach to Complexity
Today sales—and, really, commerce as a whole—has hit an all-time high of complexity. The technology industry has dealt with this complexity with an ever-increasing number of apps, a separate app developed to deal with every single factor in this complexity.
Just look at the fact that we have so many categories of sales functions: sales labeling, sales execution, sales CRM, sales marketing, sales engagement, and many more.
Each one of these functions usually exists in its own silo, and each silo has its own tech stack. Talk about complex! In reality, a company needs to implement an overall solution, not one for account management, then another for reporting, yet another for outbound calling, and yet another for something else. That kind of approach is not solving our already overly complex sales and commercial landscape.
Let’s look at this from another angle. Let’s say we were looking to deal with a number of different chemical compounds: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, phosphorus, sulfur, potassium, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium. Trying to deal with these factors individually becomes incredibly complex. Yet, do you know what these compounds combine to make? The human body. That’s you and me. Yet if we simply focus on each individual compound, we’d never see the overall human body.
A Different Way
It’s time we ceased the “one problem, one solution” way of doing things. A problem pops up, we evolve a fix for it. Yet another issue crops up, we evolve a fix for that one. We’ve been operating like that for too many years—it’s time for a new approach.
Instead of attempting to examine each different bit of information, we must understand how all of these pieces correlate and integrate.
As human beings, we attempt to view complexity by making it simpler. In the future, however, we cannot reduce complexity because it’s constantly growing. We therefore must develop systems that can deal with this complexity as we have done with Pipeliner CRM. We haven’t developed Pipeliner to deal with a single facet of sales—for example, only sales automation. No, in addition to sales automation, Pipeliner addresses project management, key account management, activity management, and much more.
Pipeliner: The Holistic Way
Therefore, Pipeliner does not fall into a single tech stack in a single category. We enhance the entire tech stack in sales—which creates a new category of the Sales Suite.
We are moving so deeply into this category that we can honestly say that Pipeliner is the only system with this completely holistic approach to complexity. Complexity is all about a variety of factors. This variety is constantly changing, which makes it dynamic. Pipeliner is, therefore, dynamic in response.
Quality Not Quantity
Complexity also means an ever-increasing quantity of factors. This will not change, but will only continue.
We must not look at dealing with this quantity of factors by applying an ever-increasing number of solutions. For example, within a company, you can have a very productive organization dealing with all kinds of complexity, consisting of relatively few people—if these people have learned to communicate and coordinate with each other and deal efficiently with complexity.
I often illustrate this point with a story from the Bible, that of Gideon defeating the Midianites in battle. God told Gideon that he was trying to fight the battle with too many men, and instructed Gideon to take his troops, numbering in the thousands, down to a river to drink. God told Gideon to eliminate all the men who dropped down and lapped at the water like dogs and keep those who drank from their cupped hands. Gideon was left with 300 competent soldiers, and won the battle with them.
In battle or in business, victory is rarely a matter of numbers. It’s a competent group of individuals who have learned to trust each other and can connect with one another.
Intangible Versus Tangible
Another aspect of complexity is that people often try to deal with complexity through things they can see. The problem is that real complexity is often intangible. You don’t always see relationships and connections. They are very definitely there, but not always visible.
In other words, there are intangible aspects to complexity. For that reason, we have created Pipeliner CRM to make the intangible tangible, and to make viewing complexity more simple.
To do so, we have utilized principles evolved by Norbert Wiener, creator of the science of cybernetics, which he called control and communication in the animal and the machine. Through these principles, we provide businesses with many different options in dealing with complexity, because each business has different complexities.
We Cannot Withdraw
Many try today to reduce complexity, which is actually the wrong approach; complexity will not reduce. We can only learn to effectively deal with it. When faced with complexity, many try and fall back to things they know, to “safe territory.”
This is exactly the opposite of what we should do. Our approach to the future should be bold and robust. We must dynamically connect to information, to organize and structure it, so it becomes a real system.
Increasing Pipeliner CRM Functionality
I agree that this kind of approach cannot work overnight. That is why we are continually adding functionality to Pipeliner, so that it can holistically deal with complexity. That is why we recently added, for example, the
Appointment Planner. Why? There is complexity in a person making their time available and inviting others. We felt it should be integrated into the whole system at no extra charge to the customer.
Other new features have dealt with other areas of business complexity, such as document management. Why would a company require a separate application to manage documents that they will utilize within CRM? With this, we have taken yet another measure that no one in the CRM space has taken.
Yet others include opportunity fitness, forecasting, and our latest addition of powerful lead management [LINK TO THIS ARTICLE WHEN POSTED.]
The Sales Suite will bring us to a new frontier in dealing with complexity and making it understandable.
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