If there’s a single aspect you’ll see about CRM promotion, it’s this: CRM vendors are constantly comparing the features and functionality of their offering versus others. Every one of them will assert that theirs is the best.

What’s fascinating, though, is that despite these endless claims, CRM adoption rate is very low. In fact, per CSO Insights, less than 40 percent of CRM customers have end-user adoption rates above 90 percent. Some other very interesting statistics include those from Forrester Research, that 49 percent of all CRM projects fail and that 22 percent of all reported problems to successful CRM implementation are people-related or linked to user adoption. Per Really Simple Systems, 83 percent of senior executives say their biggest challenge is getting their staff to use the software.

What I personally have found over the years is that there is an adoption curve that is nearly the same everywhere. There is a percentage of companies willing to try out CRM solutions, another percentage not so willing, and yet another percentage reluctant—despite the need and urgency of the digital transformation now even more demanding through AI.

Strategy Versus Culture

The above statistics reveal that problems with CRM adoption are people-related. These problems stem mainly from a lack of clear leadership priority. To obtain real CRM adoption, a change in company culture is needed.

Despite most companies formulating a solid strategy for CRM implementation, it is most often countered by a company culture in which users won’t use the software. This phenomenon is summed up beautifully in this quote from famed Austrian-American management consultant Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” which underlines again the missing link from leadership.

Analogies from Other Fields

So why won’t users adopt CRM? If we examine a couple of other fields outside of CRM and sales, the answer starts to become quite clear.

Let’s start with a musician. Any experienced musician you talk to will be extremely choosy about their instrument. A guitar player, for example, will not play a guitar they don’t like. Legendary ZZ Top guitarist Billy F. Gibbons, for nearly all of ZZ Top’s recordings, used one single 1959 Gibson Les Paul that he claimed sounded like no other guitar on Earth. In fact, he nicknamed the guitar “Pearly Gates.”

That is an example of real adoption. It leads a player to focus on the instrument and become more proficient. For any musician wanting to move from amateur to professional, that’s the way.

Another example comes from the building trades. Any professional carpenter, electrician, or contractor will be very keen on the kinds of tools they use. If you ask a carpenter about a screwdriver, hammer, or saw, you will hear about which are the best for them and why. You’ll only see such a professional with their own tools, which they jealously guard.

System Users

The same is true for users of technology. For example, some like iPhones and others prefer computers. Today, no one will use a computer that doesn’t like it.

In the old days, companies restricted what devices their employees could utilize. In many companies, it was a no-no to use an Apple computer. Such a device was only for the graphics department—and even then, a friend of mine told the story of a graphics department in a DEC-only company that got in major trouble for bringing in his personal Mac for graphics.

Those days are long gone. Companies began to realize that when people don’t like a particular technology, they won’t adopt it. If they don’t adopt it, they won’t be effective, efficient and therefore not productive. Company policies have been greatly relaxed over the years so employees may use whatever works best for them. This is also true of applications run on devices.

We find the same is true of CRM systems. Why is the overall adoption rate so low? Because the majority of users don’t like them. At the same time, companies still need real effective and efficient processes across the organization, which would help them individually to overcome barriers and time-critical factors. Only when they feel good about a system and experience real benefits do they use it and become proficient with it.

Becoming a Fan

When someone embraces a type of technology because it helps and supports the individual, they become a fan of it. Back in the 1980s, when I first embraced Apple technology, I was very proud. I created my first newsletter with the Apple Computer, and also different papers for the University, which gave me a real competitive advantage. Therefore I even had the Apple logo on the bumper of my car. Why? It was a statement. My attitude followed Steve Jobs’ famous 1984 commercial introducing the Macintosh, in which a hammer was hurled at the “gray” technology in widespread use. The technology helped the individual as opposed to only the company, which made for a real improvement in my studies and work for others.

Convincing

If a company or salesperson goes over the top to “convince” someone they should implement a system, they have already lost the battle. It’s over. If someone likes a piece of technology—or a musical instrument or a tool—they will take to it and use it. No “convincing” is needed.

Satisfaction Brings Change

Now, what of the culture change we talked about at the beginning of this article? Well, if users take to a system because they like it, they become effective and efficient with it.

When hard and long work is done, people can lay back and realize how good it feels, which brings satisfaction. Only when people become satisfied do they change, and that’s when the necessary culture change comes about.

The Pipeliner Difference

Few CRM vendors today really understand this factor. They don’t pay enough attention to what real problems they solve with the qualities of their app.

Pipeliner is the only major vendor that has designed CRM from the ground up with the goal of broad adoption and solving the sales challenge. User love and adoption has always been our objective—and this has brought about user satisfaction. The system provides the support users really need to truly perform on the job.

It is our view that technology should never be used to control or dictate to people, which has been the traditional approach with CRM. We believe that people, in the best scenarios, live in symbiosis with technology. We don’t assert that technology replaces people but that it assists and supports them. Therefore we have continually striven to understand how our end users think and work, and what could make their day and repetitive tasks easier and more efficient. We provide a tool that dovetails with those ways.

It is more than just a single instance of providing users with what they genuinely need and want. We are constantly optimizing and fine-tuning Pipeliner CRM to consistently improve. We are, in fact, the only vendor in the world that provides a new release almost monthly.

Why do we do this? Because we want to produce the best CRM engine in the world, period. And we believe we have. So do our customers!

How much do users like Pipeliner, and how well is it adopted within companies? Have a look at what our users say.

Next in our series on Pipeliner concepts, let’s explore Common Lists.

The Pipeliner CRM Common Lists are another first for Pipeliner CRM, and no other vendor has anything like them. They are directly correlated to putting the “R” back in CRM.

The Common Lists include elements relating to account hierarchy, sales roles, contact relations and account relations. As you’ll readily see, these easy-to-utilize elements have incredible usefulness to sales and account management.

Accounts Hierarchy

Accounts hierarchy is a simple but powerful tool that visually displays the relationship between accounts, and links related accounts (companies) together.

As an example, a parent company could be linked, on an account hierarchy graph, to all of its subsidiaries. This is extremely useful to any salesperson dealing with these companies, to see where they stand in the hierarchy.

Another example is a parent company and its children and yet another is a main office and branch office.

Because Pipeliner features are so flexible, Account Hierarchy is not limited in its use. Clients have used it to show relationships between a charity and its donor organizations, between property developers and favored contractors, and in many other ways.

Sales Roles

Sales roles are utilized by sales to show the various roles played by the people they are dealing with in their prospect and customer companies. Roles are used in Pipeliner’s Buying Center feature, and allow people in the targeted company to be qualified or described in the sales process.

While the listed roles can be changed, added to, or customized based on the industry, we have found seven roles typical in nearly all B2B deals. For example, you’re going to have the ultimate decision-maker, who is defined in the Sales Role list as the “Signer.” This designation can be given to them no matter their title within their own company. You can also assign a color to the role, so a salesperson can instantly identify them. Another critical role is the advocate—a person who, in the company, is your product or services’ champion.

One person might be occupying several roles, too, and this can be shown.

The roles we have listed out are signer, the decision-maker, advocate, consultant, partner, IT, and the naysayer.  Again, the list is flexible, and you can add to or change it.

Contacts Relations

In traditional contact management applications, you had a contact name, perhaps their title, and their phone number. But Pipeliner’s Contacts Relations within the Common Lists makes it possible for you to know how you are related to people outside your company. As examples:

• Who do you know who is part of the same networking organization as one of your target contacts?
• Do you have a strong relationship with a contact who used to work with one of the decision-makers you’re trying to reach?
• Have you worked with a consultant who’s working with your target?
• What former employees of yours are related to your contact?
• What common industry colleagues does this person have with you?

You can visualize this kind of data in a Relationship Graph, and even color-code it as needed.

Having this information could make a tremendous difference in the way you reach out to these contacts.

As I have said many times, the currency in the future networked community is recommendations. In such a community, a person cannot hide if they have committed criminal or even unfair acts on others—their reputation will be spread far and wide and follow them. There are more mobile phones than people on the planet today. Over 60 percent of the planetary population use mobile devices, and they can instantly know what’s currently happening.

A great example of someone who “couldn’t hide” is an attorney who, two years ago, was being lauded on all television channels as a political powerhouse. There was even consideration that this person could successfully campaign for president. Today, Michael Avenatti is doing prison time, and his career is over forever because everyone on the planet knows who he is and what he’s done.

Account Relations

The Account Relations feature allows you to assign a particular account-related role to a person within your targeted company. This is different than sales roles—it’s a role within the account. It is different than the person’s title within the company and is utilized in the account’s Relationship Graph.

For example, Account Relations is used to show if the person is the primary contact, the power user of your system, Admin IT, account contact, economic contact, or other that you may specify.

Making the Intangible Tangible

No other CRM provides functionality such as this, and it relates directly to one of Pipeliner’s missions from the beginning: making the intangible tangible. This is done through Account Hierarchy, Sales Roles, Contact Relations, and Account Relations.

In the sales arena today, we hardly see each other face-to-face anymore. We’re not having physical meetings. We don’t know, at this point, if this condition will ever change, but for now, we know it will remain at least into the near future. Therefore we have made sales and account relationships very tangible. Your target person not only has a title and a face but can be assigned a role. Their title may not be the role for you in the sales or account process, so this is important.

This is the kind of information that provides sales teams a powerful edge in selling to a target company. The more they know about a company and its contacts, the more they know about their relationships with their prospects and customers, the more they can precisely target their products and services.

Yes, the Common Lists are another primary factor in putting the “R” back in CRM!

Sales Transformation

For some years I’ve been saying that, as a society, we’re in the midst of a transformation. Given what’s happened in the last couple of years, there’s no one left who is disagreeing with me! It’s become very obvious.

One very noticeable aspect of this transformation is the image change that has occurred with salespeople. If you look at the bestselling sales books currently available, you’ll see salespeople being characterized as significant agents of positive change for companies and even for society. This is a drastic difference from salespeople portrayals as pushy, ugly, brutal, manipulative, difficult, slimy, annoying, dishonest—all the negative traits seen in such films as Death of a Salesman, Tin Men and Glengarry Glen Ross. Authors such as Jeb Blount and Daniel Pink are leading this charge.

Today we’re seeing that modern salespeople should be thought leaders. They should be empathic listeners. They should be intelligent, connect with people, solve problems, build trust, and emotionally create a positive buying experience. They should be competent and authentic. In short, a complete pendulum-swing from the way they were previously portrayed.

Sales Fraud Throughout History

The association of dishonesty with sales goes back hundreds of years, to the merchants in the medieval days of Marco Polo who were regularly cheating buyers. They did this, often, by using incorrect weights that favoured the seller. Such methods of fraud go back even further, and can even be found in the Biblical book of Leviticus: “You must not commit injustice in judging, in measuring, in weighing or in measuring liquids.”

We can remove the religious aspect and just notice that cheating in sales existed and was condemned back that far. Unfortunately, it was not a networked society, and word of sales treachery did not spread in real-time as it would today. Once a merchant cheated a buyer, the buyer never knew if they’d ever see the merchant again. We can see that today avoiding such sales fraud is not only wrong from an ethical standpoint, but from a logical one as well: word of a single instance of deceit in sales can spread throughout the world in an instant.

Effects in The Community

The effects of sales fraud are even more profound, however: they destroy the community. When winning together does not occur in sales—meaning that both sides of a deal, the seller and the buyer, win—a community cannot be built.

What happens in a community when sales fraud is occurring? Let’s say, for example, a contractor building homes in a neighborhood is a bit dishonest. Do you think for a moment that people in that community will not be talking about it? You bet. This contractor, in effect, is actually harming themselves by harming the community.

This demonstrates another reason for “win together” to occur: it strengthens the community.

Roots in Altruism

The concept of “win together” actually has its roots in altruism, which I believe is a natural trait in humans. You will innately treat someone as you want to be treated. This trait is even demonstrated in nature, with monkeys. So we can certainly listen to our inner selves and behave that way, too—and I believe that altruism is the genesis of sales.

I’m not talking about the higher calling of compassion. It’s more like a basic understanding that we’re all in the same shoes. We’re all buyers in some form, aren’t we? None of us wants to be cheated or defrauded. We want to have a “win-to-win.” So why do some salespeople do something to others that they don’t want to do to themselves?

Building Relationships

Going back to the title of this chapter, why is it so essential to winning together? Because without it, a relationship can never be built. When only one side is winning, the result is a dysfunctional relationship, which of course is no relationship at all. The elements of such a “relationship” are isolation, disconnection, mistrust, guilt, demotivation, depression, negative mindset, seeing only obstacles, problems leading to frustration, fear, self-loathing, the constant feeling that something must be fixed, and the ever-present expectation to lose.

But what do you gain when both sides win? First of all, respect yourself. Then, respect for the other person, because it’s a good deal. You have open communication, mutually beneficial for both sides. You’re willing to recommend each other. You create self-confidence and hope, and a positive attitude. You have high expectations, and you see more opportunities than obstacles and problems. You can even turn a problem into an opportunity. You build trust in yourself and trust in your customer.

All of this is why we’re putting the “R” back into Customer Relationships. Many CRM vendors believe that customer relationships come about through the use of Artificial Intelligence—something we see as a completely incorrect assertion and assumption. Machines can never replace human beings and can never perform human interaction.

Through relationships, sales can actually restore society, as people start to win together.

In our last article, we took up the fact that one type of CRM administrator acts as an architect of the CRM for the company. We’re going to now go into detail with the concepts this person needs to deal with in properly setting up CRM.

Working Out Company Structure

As described in the last article, we have two different administrator roles—one being the regular administrator and one being the architect administrator. One person might fulfill both roles or, in a larger company, two separate people might be required. In this article, we’re going to focus on the architect administrator’s role.

The first thing this architect-administrator has to work out is the company structure. How is it constructed? It could be based geographically—for instance, the company has divisions in Europe, America, and Asia. The company could also be divided into various business units, or perhaps by different product types or by type of industry. For example, Pipeliner is divided geographically between Europe,  America, Asia, and Africa and is also divided between products and services.

If these divisions are not clearly laid out and understood from the beginning, it could make for CRM problems down the road. It will be the basis of what a user—regular or advanced–will be able to view and access.

We have a clear structure at Pipeliner. We have a program called Pipelinerpreneurs, in which people have their own businesses selling and using Pipeliner CRM. People in that program can only view certain data types within CRM—they don’t need access to everything to do their job and from a security point of view, we need to restrict some areas. We also have Advanced Pipelinerpreneurs, however, and they have more access and can view more data.

The company’s structure is critically important and will be the basis of how your CRM is set up. Every company is different, so there needs to be an architect administrator who fully understands their company’s structure and can implement it within CRM.

Users and Roles

Once this company structure has been fully established, it is then used to define what the CRM users can view in terms of data and what access they have. With Pipeliner, you can add as many regular users as needed. They can be imported and exported—a feature not many CRMs offer. When a user has been created, their activities can be monitored. You can see if and when the user has used the system and what they did.

Beyond just the ordinary users, the administrator architect must define user roles. Roles are critical and are conceptually tied to the unit. A significant benefit of Pipeliner is that roles can be instantly changed within CRM when needed.

Within Pipeliner, you can also create “super-users.” This could become necessary in a larger company where, for example, you have more than one CRM administrator. These administrators would have specific functions such as consistently updating the company’s product or service catalog. They wouldn’t, however, be able to remove a user. There would be the “super-admin” who had overall authority and the final say.

Keeping It Simple

In thinking through the various units and roles, we see that the “architect” has been appropriately named. They are actually building a structure. If they’re constructing a large building, such as the tower in Dubai, they must dig deeper to construct the foundation. Or if it’s going to be a simple structure like a beach hut that sits on the sand it will be far simpler.

When creating the roles with CRM, the administrator must think through what this person is really going to need in terms of information. One serious flaw in traditional CRMs of the past was overloading the user with far too much data, way more than they needed. With Pipeliner, you can provide a role with only the information they really need, and no more.

Will the role need access to all features? Is this a power user? Do they need to import and export data? Do they need to be able to create automatic processes? (Note that only Pipeliner offers the capacity for a user to create an automatic process, to optimize workflows, with the Automatizer feature.)

If, for example, a person will only be responsible for contacts in accounts, they’re not going to require dashboards, advanced reports, or the Archive. Such information would only prove distracting. The more a person can remain focused, the more productive they are going to be.

Then, finally, what rights will a particular role need when it comes to the various entities within Pipeliner—accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, pipelines, tasks, and appointments. Should they see only their own records or records of others? Should they have read-only access or reading and writing privileges? These same kinds of permissions would also be granted through the APIs when needed.

Before anything else, the user roles and the various units must be very well defined from a business perspective. Once these are fully understood, then properly setting Pipeliner up becomes painless, and you can proceed to a technical guide that will show you how users and roles are set up strictly from a technical aspect.

A very interesting report was just released from the World Economic Forum. It highlights something that I’ve been saying for a few years, but which is really significant today: without automation no company is going to make it into the future.

One prediction made by the report is that, by 2025, 15 percent of the human workforce will be reduced, replaced by machines.

Another prediction is that also by 2025, 50 percent of the workforce will need to be reskilled.

You can see that between these two predictions, roughly half the workforce is going to be affected by advances in automation—either by being replaced or forced to reskill.

A considerable amount of manual work that is still being done in companies is rapidly becoming automated. An example given in the report is data entry clerks, part of a job demand that will decrease from 97 million to 85 million by 2025.

At Pipeliner, we are right with this trend with the Automatizer feature of Pipeliner CRM, because this is exactly what Automatizer does: makes it possible for companies to automate many of the tasks staff have been having to manually perform.

Exponential Growth

We can see that the trend in technology is most definitely exponential. We can simply look at the world’s largest repository for open source programming, GitHub, to see how true this is. In 2013, GitHub had 3 million users. Today, there are 40 million, in over 190 million repositories. This means that some 40 million programmers are working on all kinds of different code to make it better.

When putting together a program, it’s just a simple matter now to go and find a component that you need, such as a dashboard. You can simply pick it up and plug it into your program. For programmers, this very handy—and such components, being constantly worked on, only become better and better over time.

Not only are these components becoming better, but it could be said that none of them, because of this constant improvement, are low-quality. We could make a comparison to the auto industry, in which technology only becomes better and more powerful. Today, if you’re out shopping for a new car, there really are no inferior ones. When I was a teenager I had a VW bug that I worked on myself, and it had no air conditioner, no power steering or power brakes, no sunroof, no sound system—none of that. Today my car is almost like a spaceship, having all the amazing features that I couldn’t have even imagined in my old VW, and so are all the other new cars out there. Just like automobiles continue to become more robust, so do technology components.

Growing Without Staff

At Pipeliner, our contribution to this technology trend is to create a way for processes to be automated for sales, with no coding. With Automatizer, we’re offering a supremely easy workflow tool—which is actually an automation growth engine. With it you can integrate any cloud application into your workflow, for scalable processes in your organization.

As we see in the World Economic Forum report, an increasing number of humans will be replaced by technology tools such as Automatizer, over the next 5 years. That means that when a company has a successful business model, it can grow exponentially without adding a lot of staff.

Finance models for business will be changing too, as traditionally they were based on staffing offices and creating infrastructure around the staff. This got rather ridiculous, with enormous “super-cool” staff environments with rooms for employees to rest in, to play in, to think in. I think that covid19 has done away with that model, probably on a permanent basis. Companies figured out, once such infrastructures couldn’t be used anymore, that they really weren’t needed.

In fact, company offices are no longer required at all. Staff are provided the flexibility to work wherever they are located. All that is required is an infrastructure in which staff can connect and communicate.

Change We Must

This is a great deal of change, brought about very rapidly. Some people are overwhelmed by it. We know that some folks are not open to change; it’s difficult for them, and they’d rather stick with the old system.

Change can certainly be difficult. Just remember growing up, the physical changes we had to struggle through, followed by suddenly being alone in the world and having to survive. Change comes upon us, but it is not something we take to naturally. There’s always a little part of us that wants to hang onto what came before. It’s the mindset that really must change.

But change we must. Not so long ago, humans were working in factories. Today, most factory workers have been replaced by robots. And as we’ve seen, more and more work will be taken on by automation, which will have drastic implications on our lifestyles. These implications will help us redefine what real work is.

Defining Processes

Helping us redefine real work are tools such as Automatizer. But before you can create processes with something like Automatizer, you must define those processes. We could take a super-simple example of process definition in cleaning a house. People today—and throughout time, really—when they had a bit of money, want to hire someone to clean their home. But when the new house cleaner shows up, you’re going to have to give them a process. Do they start with the bathroom? The bedrooms? The living room?

Automated processes in a company must likewise be defined. The challenge of the future is, who is doing the defining, and what kind of skills do they need? As an example, in a virtual company, there’s no longer a person there answering the phone. How is the phone answered? When there is a message coming in, how is it responded to? There are “virtual secretaries” out there, and Pipeliner uses them, too. But all of these processes must be defined.

In sales, once processes have been defined, you can use Automatizer to simply create them with drag-and-drop.

To begin with, simple processes can be created. You certainly don’t have to start with multiple complex processes, such as those created by Amazon (Can you imagine the processes behind being able to place an order and having it delivered the same day, sometimes within hours?). I believe such processes are only the beginning, and we’ll see many more in the next 2 to 3 years that are even more incredible.

But let’s start easy. And we’ve certainly made it easy with Automatizer.

Pipeliner CRM hosted the inaugural meeting of the Technology in Sales Higher Education Council at the Jonathan, Club in Los Angeles on April 18th, 2019.

The founding schools include

Bradley University

California State Poly-Technical University Pomona

DePaul University

Indiana University

North Carolina A&T University

Texas State University

Texas A&M University

Texas Tech University

University of Houston

University of Texas at Dallas

University of Texas at Tyler

Winona State University

These schools met and agreed to establish an organization to promote the specific teaching of sales technology in sales and retail programs at the university level.

Daniel Strunk of DePaul University who was elected Chair stated “This is another important step in preparing the next generation of sales professionals to gain proficiency in sales technologies such as CRM. By establishing a Higher Education Council focused specifically on technology in sales, we are laying the groundwork for the teaching technology becoming an established part of every sales curriculum. On behalf of all the founding schools, I would like to thank Pipeliner CRM for sponsoring and supporting our efforts with their technology, their financial help and the direct engagement of their executive team”

The council will develop tools and guidelines on how to incorporate technology into higher education sales programs and will begin outreach to other institutions to get more colleges involved with the council. In the coming months, the council will also establish a research agenda to deliver academic and practitioner-focused insights.

“At Pipeliner CRM, we have a deep commitment to education and the professionalization of sales,” said Nikolaus Kimla, Founder & CEO of Pipeliner CRM

“Working with and supporting this new Higher Education Council is a great honor as we believe that the salesperson of the future will be constantly leveraging technology and CRM will become the core operating system of business and as such we are delighted to help lay those foundations now”.

Take a free trial of Pipeliner CRM and see the difference!

From the beginning, a primary goal for any CRM application has been an efficient management of sales performance. It has also been a desire of individual team members to evaluate their own performance. With its original release of Performance Insights, Pipeliner CRM well surpassed this functionality which has, in traditional CRM applications, proven overly complex and unwieldy. We introduced the ability for reps and sales units to be visually compared for a specified time period, with one or more KPIs, instant “click to detail” analysis and more.

A Whole New Level

With Pipeliner CRM Universals, we have taken Performance Insights to a whole new level. It begins with the new Power Panel, which enables Pipeliner CRM’s powerful filter functionality to be applied to Performance Insights. Filter in our out your own statistics, or those of your team. Next we have brought in a new feature called Collaborative Conversions; for all users collaborating within a sales process, including SDRs, BDRs and salespeople, Collaborative Conversions maps a visual overview of success rates for the entire team.  

The Performance Insights Life Cycle feature provides a view on the time (in days) required to close an opportunity by your team members. By user or unit, Life Cycle tracks the time leads and opportunities remain in the system. And our new Performance Insights Comparison Chart shows you a comparison between open, won and lost opportunities–all within the same graphic.

But Wait, There’s More…

We have brought sales activities up to the level of many other Pipeliner CRM features, and now all types of sales activities—including tasks and events—are now fully customizable with a broad variety of custom fields and forms.

Through the new In-App Notification Center, you receive notifications about new data added to leads, opportunities, contacts, accounts or activities with which you are associated. You are notified when existing data is updated, when emails are received, when documents are uploaded, or when another user sends you a message. You can also send messages to other users. Simply click on any lead, opportunity, contact, account, activity within a notification to dive in and obtain more information.

We’ve also brought new functionality to Pipeliner Mobile CRM. We’ve added our powerful Product Catalogue and In-App Notification features to Mobile, as well as providing several great new additions to the Sales KPI Dashboard.

As always, we are bringing you a number of other improvements to continuously enable sales and sales management.

Find out more about Pipeliner CRM Universals!

Try a free trial of Pipeliner CRM.

As anyone in a sales position knows, a CRM solution is only as good as the data that can be extracted from it and used to control and manage sales. This is especially true in today’s hectic, lightning fast, highly competitive sales environment. One of the crucial ways in which CRM data is expressed is through reports.

Pipeliner already offers a robust array of reporting features, including 1-click reporting, forecast reports, 24 popular pre-formatted management reports, and the sales KPI dashboard. With our latest release, Pipeliner CRM Chronology, we have now added a whole new dimension: Advanced Reporting. This feature allows you to you combine any record type (opportunities, leads, accounts, contacts, products, feeds, notes, activities) or report type (standard or pivot) into one single report.

Advanced Reporting utilizes another brand-new feature, Report Builder, a visual report editor. The Report Builder screen lets you work with opportunities, accounts, leads and contacts, and define their relations. You can also work with report fields, and define custom filters for each report type.

As always, with this new release we have brought much more sales-empowering functionality in addition to Advanced Reporting.

Enhanced Opportunity Management

To Pipeliner’s totally visual opportunity management, we have now added a label feature–you can now label opportunities so that priorities are instantly viewed:

Focus–this is a top priority lead or opportunity that should be worked right away
Hot–this is a hot lead or opportunity that should be worked as buyer is very active
Stalled–The opportunity is stuck from the buyer point of view.

Enhanced Sales Task Management

With the release of Pipeliner CRM Chronology, you can invite other users as well as contacts to appointments, and can track an email as an activity. You can also set a default due date for tasks, if it is helpful.

Pipeliner CRM Mobile Enhancements

We know that CRM must serve salespeople wherever they are–and salespeople are often far away from their desks and offices. We have made Pipeliner Mobile CRM even more empowering for salespeople on the go. Pipeliner’s most important features are all available as part of the mobile version. Additionally:

• Pipeliner’s powerful Pipeline View feature is now part of Mobile CRM, along with its new labeling feature.
• Our KPI Dashboard feature has now been fully integrated with Mobile CRM.

Find out what Pipeliner CRM can do for you, your sales team and your company! Try a free trial today.