“Why would a CRM solution have a philosophy?” you might ask. “Philosophy is for heavy thinkers in ivory towers. We’re a company with salespeople. We just want to close deals and move on to the next one so we can make our targets.” But stick with us—you might learn something that could greatly help your sales force and your enterprise.
The philosophy behind many CRM applications seems to be this: “Let’s bring customer relationship management activities for all departments—including sales—together in one application so that they’re all recorded in the same place. At the same time, let’s have as much sales data in there as possible so that we can keep track of the sales force and its various sales cycles.”
While this might not be the stated intention of CRM developers, that’s certainly the philosophy that has manifested in the real world. You might notice that there’s nothing there about truly assisting sales reps to sell, about providing them a real toolkit for assisting them in their sales.
That’s where Pipeliner CRM takes a real departure from tradition.
Pipeliner CRM Solution Philosophy
For most philosophies you have to travel back a bit in time, and this one is no different. About 150 years ago an Austrian attorney and journalist named Carl Menger observed, as he was covering stories, that there was a considerable discrepancy between the classical economics he’d studied in school and what actually occurred in the real world. The ultimate result was the Austrian School of Economics—a school of thought that caught considerable fire as time wore on and is still quite alive today.
One key observation that emerged from the Austrian School was that decisive human action is the primary causation in any economy. Whereas other economic theory rested on the reactions of consumers and markets, this one painted more of a true picture: that purposeful human action is the primary agent of economic change.
For the economy of a nation, that action is originated by entrepreneurs – the ones CRM Solution should truly empower. An entrepreneur possesses the ability to see opportunities that others might miss, and has the ingenuity to act upon them. It’s a fact that any economic boom can be traced back to one or more entrepreneurs seizing opportunities and exploiting them to the benefit of their companies, their communities and their countries.
A company is usually founded and run by one or more such entrepreneurs. But do you realize that there are actually entrepreneurs within a company, that possess the same traits as its founders? They, too, are capable of observing opportunities that others miss, and are capable of taking advantage of them. As a nation benefits from its entrepreneurs, so does a company benefit from these entrepreneurs within the enterprise.
These entrepreneurs within the enterprise are known as salespeople. And for the same reasons that it is the mission of the Austrian School of Economics to empower entrepreneurs, it is the mission of Pipeliner CRM Solution to empower salespeople.
Prediction and Reduction of Risk
The Austrian School also tells us that because human action is inherently unpredictable, that one can never totally predict economic growth. For that reason we never make the claim that, with Pipeliner CRM Solution, you can totally predict revenue—as some CRM developers have implied they can. When you boil it down it’s a bit of an obvious point: even a deal that’s virtually “in the bag” is subject to numerous variables that can keep it from happening. The primary decision maker can be suddenly dissuaded and change her mind; the company can experience an upheaval that affects their purchasing capability; a competitor can swoop in and make an irresistible offer.
What Pipeliner does promote and what we can deliver is a clear, visual way to reduce the risk associated with sales cycles. An entrepreneur generally has an instinct for gauging the risk involved in an opportunity and being right more than he or she is wrong. Pipeliner supports that ability with a visual representation of your sales process, within our CRM solution, of why a particular sales cycle is more liable to win, or to lose.
So yes, there can certainly be a philosophy behind a CRM solution. In our case it’s one that empowers the most important group of causal agents within a company: the sales force.
What does a totally empowering CRM solution look like? Find out here.
