Continuing our series on Pipeliner and its rightful place in the CRM market, let’s now take an overall look at why Pipeliner CRM is factually superior to its competitors.
Reprogramming
Throughout Pipeliner’s development, we have done everything possible to use only open source components. This is not only for programming, but also for the operating system, Ubuntu, which we are running within AWS (Amazon Web Services, our cloud host). Ubunto comes from a Bantu term meaning “Philosophy” but is translated as “I am because we are.” It means that we are all one, and is a belief in the universal bond that binds all humanity.
We also utilize open source for our database, our components and programming languages. Our backend is programmed in Python, and the front end in Angular.
One factor that makes Pipeliner superior is how we brought all of these components together. We have the latest technology and know how complex it can be to reprogram. It took us many years to do so—nearly a decade—as Pipeliner was originally in a different technology.
At first, Pipeliner was built with the Adobe AIR framework. Back when we were deciding in which direction to go, Adobe became excited about Pipeliner. They helped us with a PR message and put up a banner ad for Pipeliner that ran for three months. We knew that Pipeliner would be a success because every day the banner ad ran, we had 67,000 downloads per day.
That success prompted our move to the United States from Austria in 2013. Shortly after we arrived, however, Steve Jobs made the decision to kill Flash, and Adobe decided not to continue developing Adobe AIR. At that point, we began the move to HTML5.
It took us until 2018 to reprogram for HTML5, and even after we did, the product still wasn’t as robust as it had been on Adobe AIR.
You have to realize that, this whole time, we were rebuilding the product from its very foundation upward. How important is a foundation? Think of the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It is the foundation, sunk hundreds of feet deep, that makes the skyscraper’s stability possible. In the case of Pipeliner, a robust foundation was vital so the system could be scaled. It’s one thing to have a system that will handle 100 users—quite another that will handle thousands.
Open Source Contribution
This kind of development requires the right team—you cannot, for example, go to any team and say, “Build us the highest skyscraper in the world.” There is a tremendous amount of knowledge required. In fact, there were several major companies involved in Burj Khalifa’s construction.
Pipeliner, as we said earlier, is based on open source. We have over 72 components, including all the visualization for reporting, graphics, dashboards and much more, all programmed with open-source technology. In just a few short years, GitHub, the internet hosting service for open-source programming, has skyrocketed from 24 million to over 100 million programmers. Because of this mammoth contribution, we will see tremendous strides in the software industry.
Focus on Technology Development
Because technology is making such exponential strides, it is vitally important that companies focus on technology. It is the key to the future, which is also why Pipeliner has focused on it. Other CRM vendors are spending millions or even billions of dollars on marketing instead of technology, for the purpose of gaining brand awareness. I believe that technology is the more important factor.
Technology is complicated within CRM, simply because CRM is more than just a single little app. This is why there are so many apps in the Salesforce app store, because Salesforce is just a hub. We’re not an app for some other platform, however—we’re a fully developed, powerful CRM system. Pipeliner includes lead management, and under lead management are complete stages, lead forms, lead qualification, and lead scoring. Also included is opportunity/pipeline management, and under opportunity management is sales stages, sales activities and much more. Then there is account management, contact management, reporting, statistics, analytics, and more.
Another reason Pipeliner is superior is that in the last 14 years, we have optimized our development process to create the perfect software factory, with incredibly competent programmers. Previously, this same group developed WorldCheck Banking Risk Intelligence, which became the leading application in its field, eventually being acquired by Thomson Reuters for $530 million.
I am inundated with weekly calls with offers to hire programmers, as if we could simply put a bunch of programmers in a room with some directions and say, “Program this!” We have learned how complex the development process is, and how important optimization of that process is.
In our last article, we talked about how, over many years, the amazing Porsche 3.5-liter engine has been developed to near-perfection, and still continues. It was done incrementally. We have followed this same incremental pattern, not only for the development process but also for Pipeliner itself. We make over 5,000 incremental improvements every year, with a new release once per month. That means in the last couple of years we have made at least 20,000 improvements!
Laser Focus
This process—building on open source, building on components, utilizing an expert, experienced team—is the major differentiator between Pipeliner CRM and others. It’s what makes Pipeliner superior to other CRMs.
Our focus is laser-precise—strictly on a sales CRM. As we said, we’re not for every business. But we fully empower sales teams in medium to large B2B companies to be as perfect as possible.
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