In this series, we’ve covered why CRM has failed in the past, what is really needed for a CRM today, what we at Pipeliner are doing about it, just how Pipeliner empowers salespeople, and where CRM should be in the future.

For our final article in the series, let’s talk about why CRM is so vital today—and why it is that, if you don’t have it, you’re not going to make it.

The Internet and the digital revolution has created an “age of the buyer” in which the buyer wants to be addressed personally, individually, and very clearly.

On top of that, today we’re in a global economy. That means customers are, quite literally, everywhere. And as businesses become more decentralized and more people are working remotely, so are the employees quite literally everywhere (note: this is a description of my own company). For both these reasons SaaS businesses continue to boom tremendously.

It All Leads Back to Processes

All of these things create a crucial demand for processes. Everything done in a company is done on a process, and requires a process. A process is how things get done—how staff know to, speaking figuratively, pick up the ball and pass it to the next player.

The demand for exact processes goes back to manufacturing. The original master of process creation was Jack Welch, former Chairman and CEO of General Electric. In the early to mid-1980s Welch pushed manufacturing to a whole new level—and it was all through optimizing processes. It is worthy of note that during his tenure the company’s value rose an astonishing 4,000%.

Processes in the Digital Age

Today the requirement for processes has become extremely acute—if you don’t have every one of your processes optimized, your business runs less efficiently, which of course can lead to a loss of marketshare or even failure. Hence the digital revolution is constantly forcing people and companies to think in processes.

It’s a cold, hard truth that whether or not you create and hone your processes, your competitors will. They’ll be continuing to address customers, vendors and needs with digital processes, and with ever-improving agility. As stated by Pierre Nanterme, CEO of Accenture: “Digital is the main reason just over half of the companies on the Fortune 500 have disappeared since the year 2000.”

0So it has become a very salient fact that without core processes—whether they be for accounts, contacts, activities, sales, HR or whatever—your business is lost and will not survive.

Processes and CRM

Which of course leads us back to our main topic: CRM. For it is CRM that is expanding to incorporate all of a company’s processes, beginning with its most important activity: sales.

In order for a CRM application to stand up to the demand for processes, and in order for it to integrate and run with them, a CRM:

• should be reasonably priced, so that companies can acquire and implement it with relative ease.
• should be easy and fast to get up and running. Companies can no longer afford administrative runways of months on end, and fortunes spent on administrator training.
• should be intuitive and easy for users to train on. Training times of weeks and months are no longer acceptable—should be hours or, at most, days.
• should empower users, no matter where they exist inside or even outside the company. Users should have their jobs made easier, not more complex.
• should be extremely flexible and customizable, as no 2 companies are alike.

These are the deciding factors of who will in the battle in the CRM industry. While it may seem that Salesforce today has all the good cards, user polls clearly show that users don’t like Salesforce.

So the question remains, based on the above deciding factors, who is really the winner?

I’ll leave you to figure that out for yourself.

Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

If one flat statement could be made about today’s sales environment, “It is really complex” would certainly serve. Going back in time, there were 2 basic sales jobs—a salesperson and a sales manager. Today we have field sales, inside sales, SDR sales, vertical sales, horizontal sales, and more. Sales has become a complex team sport which requires precise coordination.

On top of that, we’ve also moved into the digital age. We have multiple systems gathering data. We’re constantly seeking to integrate further data sources, more inputs, and greater and additional technology. The digital age has also meant an enormous diversification and proliferation of sales channels that must be monitored, acted upon and supervised.

Complexity is also reflected with customers, especially in B2B sales. It’s not simply a matter of a buyer approving a purchase—now there are committees and multiple decision-makers, all of which a salesperson must keep track of and deal with if a sale is to be made.

For sales, all the above can unfortunately boil down to one thing: losing track of the person on the other side of that screen: the prospect, the buyer, the customer. In other words, the one individual or group of individuals that in the end will mean a win or a loss.

Technology Must Help, Not Complicate

Here at Pipeliner, we’ve been watching this complexity evolve since the beginning of our company. Because of it, we started out on a completely different footing than traditional CRM applications. We designed a CRM solution to empower sales teams, not weigh them down with data entry and administration.

Technology is only as good as the results that come out of it. If technology is not helping to deal with and solve that complexity, then all it’s doing is making complexity more complicated. Which, unfortunately, has been the end result of many of the leading CRM applications over the years.

Enter Cybernetics

Now there is a word you probably didn’t figure you’d hear in a blog post about sales and CRM—cybernetics!

What is cybernetics, and how does it apply? Well, cybernetics is the study of closed cognitive learning systems—specifically the study of how machines can be created to think and act as humans. But moreover, the science of cybernetics is used to approach, understand and deal with complex systems.

Pipeliner’s next version, due very shortly, will incorporate cybernetics. It is the next quantum leap in CRM technology—and will assist sales teams, organizations and companies to squarely face today’s complexity head-on, instantly sort it out and navigate it.

Stay tuned for further news!

In this series, we’ve covered why CRM has failed in the past, what is really needed for a CRM today, what we at Pipeliner are doing about it, and just how Pipeliner empowers salespeople.

Now, where should CRM be as we move out into the future? And how should CRM relate to the ongoing digital revolution?

Avoiding Extinction

Today if a business is to survive, it must embrace technology. Many companies have disappeared simply because they didn’t embrace it—and they really had no chance.

Businesses and society seem to be undergoing one of the most fundamental transformations in history. What is happing might better be understood as an Old World dying because a New World is being born. There will hardly be any bridges back to the old state of affairs. Perhaps the most practical premise to navigate by is that whatever can change will change.

— Fredmund Malik

Relation to CRM

So what does this mean for a CRM solution? First, it means kind of a reverse look—in order to be embraced by those seeking technology, CRM must in turn deal directly with the business pains that need to be addressed.

There are 3 main parts to a CRM today, and any CRM that is to survive must contain all 3:

1. It must be easily scalable
2. Integration of data into it must be easy
3. It should replace multiple tools

Cutting Down the Multiple

Focusing in on #3 there above, there is an issue that is becoming ever more problematic when it comes to the sheer volume of solutions out there. There are many thousands of applications a company can avail itself of. Companies attempt to play it smart hunt out the “best of breed” for such applications—but in so doing they find the financial outlay to be considerable. Then when a company purchases them, or subscribes to the SaaS, it becomes even more expensive because these solutions require regular updates.

In my opinion the industry is headed for considerable risk because of this. A company can buy yet another app to address just about any problem, which means mounting costs. On the other hand, vendors cannot make such solutions too cheap, else they themselves won’t survive.

The risk factor is that some of the applications aren’t bad—but if left to stand alone they couldn’t survive. They themselves depend on other applications because they are too specialized. If you have too many specialized apps in a company, not only is it a financial problem but one of complexity.

I believe that in the next 2 years companies will be advised to cut down on the volume and complexity of such applications. CRM solutions such as ours are stepping in to pick up the slack.

The 6 Deadly Sins of CRM

Additionally, as we move into the future, any CRM solution to survive must avoid these 6 deadly sins.

#1: Don’t be a “Big Brother”

George Orwell’s famous novel 1984 gave us the term “Big Brother.” In the story, and as it’s used today, the term means having someone constantly watching and monitoring you in order to control you. Nobody likes to live like that—including salespeople or other CRM users.

Pipeliner set out to totally avoid the “Big Brother” syndrome right from the start. Pipeliner is completely designed to empower salespeople, not to control them.

The magic of such an approach can be seen in any company that has implemented a CRM such as this: one of the primary CRM issues is solved—that of correct data in CRM. If users are happy, and using the system because it brings them benefit, the data entered is going to be correct. Correct data is fundamental to everything, including all of your reports and forecasts.

So a CRM shouldn’t motivate with control—it should motivate with actually helping.

#2: Don’t make an easy system complex and difficult

A CRM system (such as ours, for example) can be designed to be totally easy to customize and use. But at the same time, when the system is implemented, it can be overloaded with mandatory fields and be made to require twice the data that is really needed.

In addition to being easy to customize and use, a CRM should be intelligently implemented. What data is really needed for users to use it? All customization should be targeted directly to helping users do their jobs better.

#3: “Always access” to CRM

Despite the fact we’re living in the 21st century in a very technical age, there are still many places in the world—even in fully developed countries such as the US—without Internet access. Anyone using CRM, especially salespeople, must have access to the full system with or without Internet access.

A CRM should make it possible to get the job done online or off.

#4: Don’t kill your adoption rate before you’ve even started

Steering clear of these CRM deadly sins, especially #1 and #2 above, you will make CRM something users desire to use and will adopt. A complex, control-oriented application that users will find difficult to take to will mean a low adoption rate—and your CRM project has died before it was ever born.

#5: Don’t make CRM an island

Although it should certainly be central, a CRM should also not be the only tool that a company or even a sales force depends on. CRM is important, and is becoming more and more the heart of an organization (as we’ve noted, the term “CRM” is no longer correct because it does far more than simply “manage customer relationships”). But even so, CRM should not be an island. It should not be isolated, it should be integrated. When you don’t integrate CRM with your other main systems, it becomes a silo—and the age of the silo is long over.

#6: Don’t choose a CRM that is slow to set up

Don’t choose a CRM that has a ramp-up time like many of the traditional ones do—3–4 months or longer, and long training periods for users. In addition to being intuitive and easy to grasp and understand, a great CRM works best when it has context-sensitive help that can be rapidly accessed when a user doesn’t remember an operational point or needs to learn it newly.

When a CRM is slow to implement and hard to learn, the motivation for using it starts dipping into minus territory—and you’re back into Sin #4 once again.

Heading into the future not only means adopting technology, it means adopting the right technology, and ensuring that your CRM solution conforms to the same standards.

What makes Pipeliner CRM the CRM to bring you into the future? Find out!  Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

In this series, we’ve covered why CRM has failed in the past, what is really needed for a CRM today and what we at Pipeliner are doing about it.

Now let’s take a look at how and why Pipeliner factually and practically empowers salespeople. If you utilize CRM anywhere at any time, this could be very valuable information for you.

Lowered Value Across the Boards

As we’ve gone over, traditional CRM applications were crippled by the technology available at the time of development, plus the incorrect approach of turning the user into a data-entry clerk without providing any kind of return on all back to that user. In other words, for all that data entered, they were provided no help in making their sales. CRM was basically put there so management could monitor sales, but not so salespeople could be better or more efficient at selling.

Because salespeople abhorred CRM, they were entering the least amount of data possible. They didn’t care all that much—they weren’t going to get anything out of it anyway. The result? A CRM application that cost the company a great deal of money, time and resources that was anything but a return on investment.

The real irony is that the CRM application was supposedly there for management. Yet if you go into just about any organization running traditional CRM, you’ll find sales managers chasing all over the place to obtain up-to-date information about sales: calling and emailing the reps, and holding lengthy sales meetings to get the latest—instead of getting this data from CRM, simply because full information isn’t in CRM. So CRM hasn’t even fulfilled the purpose it was put there for.

Reverse Approach

When we set out to develop Pipeliner, we knew that CRM was not assisting salespeople, simply by the phrase we heard from them again and again: “CRM sucks!” We decided then to reverse the approach of CRM, and make it more of a bottom-up than a top-down model. In other words, we were out to develop an application that would truly empower salespeople, and make it totally worthwhile for them to use CRM.

We knew that if we did so, the quality of the data being input into CRM would be greatly enhanced. That meant that not only sales reps would benefit, but sales management would have a single, central real-time repository for sales data, to which they could look at any time and gain an instant understanding of the current sales scene. Or, as we like to say, instant intelligence, visualized.

The Daily Assist

From the beginning, our approach to Pipeliner development has been highly practical. We continually ask the question What helps the individual on a daily basis? The answers to this question have evolved into every feature and benefit we see in Pipeliner today, from its visual pipeline, timeline, dynamic target, account, contact, and KPI views, right down to its powerful reports.

At any time, a user can take a very rapid look into Pipeliner and totally grasp where they stand in relation to the target.

As an example of Pipeliner’s flexibility, a user can look over the opportunities in a pipeline and quickly exclude opportunities that may not come in, or are too much of the target to be counted on with confidence (the target will fall completely flat without them). Or, other opportunities could be included to see how closing them could boost the target. Of course, sales management could do this also.

Another very practical feature is “Recently opened”—which I like to call “Monday morning.” In this feature, they can see which accounts, contacts, opportunities or leads they’ve recently opened. That’s why I call it “Monday morning”—a user can come in on Monday and see what they did on Friday. Immediately they know what to do.

We also have a “star” feature to mark your favorites, just as you would in a browser.

In addition to all of its major, very practical functionality (of which there is much more to come), we’ve also paid attention to details that might seem unimportant. For example from just about anywhere in Pipeliner a user can write a reminding note, something like “Bring a bottle of wine to the meeting,” that wouldn’t necessarily need to be in CRM proper, but something rep would not want to forget.

Assumption of Love

Overall, the assumption is made with Pipeliner that the user will love it, its functionality and usefulness. The core understanding is that as much as the salesperson is liking, using, and actively involved in the product, the data becomes highly useful for the rep, the manager and anyone else that needs information from CRM.

And from what we hear from customer after customer—we’re totally succeeding in this mission.

What is that makes Pipeliner CRM so incredibly practical and useful? Find out!  Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

As we’ve covered in the first 2 blogs in this series—Will It Now Succeed? and What Should a CRM Really Be Today?—no traditional CRM application has truly empowered salespeople.

Interestingly, we brought Pipeliner into the marketplace at a time when the market was actually overrun with CRM applications. One could certainly ask, with some justification, why we did this. For the answer, I turn to Peter Thiel from his great book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future:

It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits. The way to do that is to dominate a small niche and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long-term vision.

I picked the CRM arena because, at the time when I was looking for my next major software development, I kept hearing one phrase repeated over and over by salespeople: “CRM sucks.”

If you were in a small town and local citizens kept saying that the “restaurant food sucked,” and if you were an entrepreneur, you’d most likely open a restaurant that people would like. In a similar fashion, I thought that if a majority of the CRM products out there were not delivering what people truly needed and wanted, there was certainly room for one that did. I set out to develop that product.

Finding the Right Approach

In terms of making CRM easier to use, many developers were (and some still are) following the trend of making data entry easier, since salespeople have been complaining about data entry. As important this approach is and should be, I think data entry is only the symptom of a deeper complication, and only a partial solution. The real issue is that CRM does nothing to assist the salesperson (and little to assist the sales manager) in sales, once all that data has been entered.

What was needed from a CRM product manager was to really figure out what CRM users were actually doing, and how they could best be assisted in getting it done. Or put another way, how we could assist CRM users to work more effectively and efficiently in an ever-changing environment. Just from viewing this crucial need, we can see that most CRM systems were created from a developer and not a user point of view. Working from the user viewpoint is but one of Pipeliner’s radical departures from tradition.

We’re currently living in a world that is constantly moving and shifting, with areas that will never be the same. Overlapping this is the digital world, which is regularly bringing new technologies. In all of this we need a highly effective CRM (although as I pointed out in the last blog that term has already been exceeded as we’re accomplishing much more than “customer relationship management.”).

Such a system must be incredibly flexible, and rapidly and easily adoptable. If not, then you regularly miss the opportunities that pass by you like waves—from customers, from competitors, from the market, from new industries and even from your own product development.

Cutting Out the Middlemen

As we’ve seen with traditional CRM applications, when you have a very static and complex system, you need a lot of middlemen. This has been no more apparent than with the mega-publishers such as Microsoft and Oracle—whole companies have made millions from being CRM consultants in between these companies and their clients.

A system such as ours cuts out such middlemen through greatly improved technology, but also through the core concept of our architecture. We have deliberately developed Pipeliner CRM to be understandable, adaptable and customizable by anyone. On the one hand cutting out middlemen costs people jobs—but on the other hand it creates new ones, and saves companies millions in the bargain.

The Pipeliner Concept

So given everything that had come before, and the fact that most users thought “CRM sucked,” we knew we had to start fresh.

The very basic idea came from an old IBM war room concept. This concept dictated that you had a board up in front of the room, and on the right-hand side of the board was the target. Pipeliner CRM reflects this concept utilizing brand new forms of technology and visualization.

Then I realized that if we were going to develop a CRM solution that users actually used, we would have to, in some way, make it enjoyable and perhaps even fun. Digital gaming had exploded and had become the biggest market on the planet—everyone was into it. I wondered why some elements of games could not also be brought into a business application, which was traditionally flat and boring. For that reason we made Pipeliner highly visual and even brought “gamification” elements into it.

Horizontal Processes

Because society has become so digital, only companies that have made that same transition will survive into the future. Beyond that, it is crucial that in the digital world every business must have a process in order to survive.

We knew from the beginning that every company had their own process and that no two were alike. For that reason we developed Pipeliner to be instantly customizable to a company’s exact sales process.

But we also have observed that, within a company, different areas of the company or different departments have their own processes—such as product sales, service sales, after-sales, pre-sales, and lead management. Hence we have made it possible for a company to implement as many processes as they need, within our CRM solution. And we’re actually the only CRM to do this two different ways—through our main pipeline view, and also through our unique bubble-chart 3D timeline. The lack of multiple processes is one of the reasons that traditional CRM applications have not been successful in the past.

These processes are the horizontal layer—each process proceeding to its own dynamic target on the right.

Because not everyone will need the same view of a pipeline—and some, like sales managers, will need a multitude of views—users can rapidly develop profiles through which processes can be viewed in totally unique ways. These profiles can be saved for repeated use. This approach is yet another Pipeliner-only benefit, an application of the concept of working with and leading teams.

Vertical Process Steps

But when this development was done, we thought that it wasn’t quite enough: What were users doing vertically in each step of a process? In other words, what actions were being taken to accomplish that single process step?

We made all of the tasks and activities required to complete a process step totally visual, and of course completely customizable. They can even be made mandatory so that no opportunity can be moved into the next process step unless certain tasks or activities are completed. And as part of our overall approach, we implemented a form of gamification into tasks and activities, knowing that salespeople like to play, and can use a playful push for reaching their targets.

Online…and Offline

Another observation we made, especially when Cloud applications began proliferating, was that not everyone had Internet access all the time, everywhere. This is still true…yet salespeople and others using Pipeliner must continue to do their jobs, online or off. For that reason of Pipeliner has the unique functionality of having the entire application available whether or not the user is online. The online and offline versions are immediately synchronized when Internet access is once again available.

Heart and Soul

All of the above is the core, the heart, the soul of what Pipeliner CRM is and does. Everything else has been added on to these core concepts:

• visualization of the horizontal process in multiple pipelines
• steered by profiles to the target
• always having the “war-room” view so that you’re always alert to where you’re standing
• in the vertical actions of a single stage, you always know what you have to go through the seller’s activities and the buyer’s actions.

Next: How Pipeliner CRM helps assist and create a whole new model of salesperson.

Find out for yourself why Pipeliner CRM is continuously praised as the most visual, the most flexible and the most user-friendly. Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

In the last blog in this series, I discussed the serious shortcomings of CRM applications in the past. There were two major reasons for this—one being the technology not being up to par, and the other being that the user was completely left out of the development equation. For that reason a common phrase about CRM became popular with users: “CRM sucks.”

A prime reason for user complaints was the amount of data entry that was required from users, especially salespeople—without any actual assistance and help back to them from the CRM solution. A cry began to be raised by users for CRM to be simplified and made easier when it came to data entry.

Following Thought Processes

But being easy and simple for data entry is a very short-sided view of CRM. Data entry isn’t the primary issue on which we need to focus, if we’re to really understand what CRM should be, and develop sound CRM applications in the future.

Which leads to the crucial question and the topic for this article: What should CRM be doing for a company?

Despite the “big bang” explosion of the Internet (described in the first blog in this series) that brought about a revolution in data, many CRM solutions (including some of the big ones) are still presenting data in spreadsheet-type—albeit glorified spreadsheet-type—formats. These formats do not at all match up with the ways the Internet and new technology have changed how people are thinking and using technology.

You could say that today technology has become an extension of the mind. People conduct searches for items and data, but the internet has become just as vital when people have questions. For example, one could ask, “When was the American Declaration of Independence written?” and have the answer in seconds. It is no longer necessary to memorize reams of facts.

People are moving out of line-by-line, step-by-step organization of data into a more contextualized approach of, “Where do I find an answer to my question?” CRM solutions have not taken this shift in thinking into account. Hence, CRM applications in the future are going to have to become more intelligent in terms of what they are providing for the user, and how they are providing it.

CRM Provision of Data—and Why

Today a CRM user is totally bombarded by too much information. For that reason, one function of the new breed of CRMs must be as a guide through all the noise. CRM should provide focus to the user into tasks, activities and opportunities on which the user should have attention.

For anyone coming newly into the company, CRM should be something that immediately helps the person dive right in and start their job—with no pain. It should be similar to buying a new car; it’s something that is actually a fairly complex operation, but you can just get in and drive.

For any user type within an organization—whether it be a salesperson, finance personnel, sales development rep, tech support or any others—the information should be right there, immediately available in real time for one purpose and one purpose only: to help the person make sound management decisions.

Well Beyond “CRM”

Today many people actually have an incorrect perspective on management—they think that the first point of management is managing subordinates. Some have forgotten that the first part of management is managing yourself.

If you’re going to do that effectively, you need technology. Today anyone in business cannot deal with the rapidity and complexity of data, and information overload without digital solutions.

The actual solution people need for this management is CRM. But for practical purposes we need a broader term than “CRM”, simply because “management” as addressed by a solution such as Pipeliner, goes well beyond just “customer relationships.”

For managing oneself, a solution begins with helping address priorities, tasks, needs and issues for the person. Then, the system must provide indications, triggers, notifications and suggestions that are important to the user today, right now. A person has a quota, a job, a set of tasks—what does the person have to do to reach or attain that?

Then, following in sequence of the correct order of management, a person would next have to excel in managing the relationship with their boss. The boss will always have questions about where things are at, what’s coming up, how targets are being met, and so on. Part of a person’s management would have to include how they efficiently handle this relationship.

Next in line come the customers—and beyond customers (still in the realm of sales) you’re also dealing with leads, prospects and repeat customers.

But it doesn’t end there. In a growing company, you have peers, and management of peer relationships is also a management job.

Finally, at the end of the line, comes the part of the job that everyone thinks is the first part: that of managing subordinates.

Helping take care of the entirety of management as pictured above is the future view of CRM (or whatever its expanded version comes to be called). The battle for CRM will be for the solution that effectively accomplishes all of these things.

Next up: The true-life story of the CRM that is meeting the above qualifications head-on.

Instant Intelligence, Visualized.  Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

A Failure?

Yes, it’s true. Going back roughly 25 years ago to the original development of CRM and coming forward to fairly recently, it could certainly be said that the first iteration of CRM applications has been a failure. They’ve been costly, incredibly difficult and expensive to implement, and additionally expensive to administrate. These factors comprised the first part of the failure.

The second part of CRM’s failure is that CRM applications, which were developed in a large part to monitor and track sales, were literally forced down users’ (salespeople’s) throats. Nobody bothered to check with salespeople to see what would actually assist them in doing what they were hired to do—make sales. Hence salespeople, when it came to CRM, became little more than glorified data entry clerks. CRM was so complex and unwieldy that sales reps had to resort to their own devices, such as spreadsheets and copious notes, to actually track and control their own sales.

The other major users of CRM, sales managers, met with equally difficult obstacles. Instead of being able to rely on CRM for the purpose of watching over reps’ progress and the progress of opportunities, they instead had to communicate with salespeople—through emails, in sales meetings and direct contact—to be constantly updated on sales progress.

A primary reason for this failure was, the technology to make a truly intuitive, useful CRM just didn’t exist back when development began. Graphical user interfaces were only just coming about, and coding had a long way to go before it would really provide anything approaching user-friendly. Unfortunately many of the platforms—especially from behemoth developers such as Oracle and Microsoft—seemed to be cast in stone, and have stayed with us up until today. And they bring with them many of the same problems they carried when first released.

The Big Bang and the Buyer Revolution

What could be considered to be the very beginning of today’s computing universe—the modern “big bang” if you will—was, of course, the Internet. And as it was with just about everything, the Internet was the real game-changer when it came to CRM.

The primary reason the Internet was such a game-changer for CRM had little to do with the software itself. It actually had everything to do with the way the Internet empowered buyers.

Prior to the Internet, buyers learned just about everything about products and services from the salespeople selling those products and services. Buyers could not totally trust the information they were getting—it was coming directly from salespeople after all—so had to take it with a grain of salt. But alas there were few ways that buyers could compare products and obtain real user data about them.

The Internet totally obliterated that problem. It wasn’t long before product reviews, both professional and amateur, were everywhere. Not only that, there were user forums and, later, social media groups through which buyers could learn all about any product or service they were evaluating—without ever having to contact a sales rep.

We then landed in an environment in which the buyer held the majority of the cards. They had made at least a tentative decision before ever talking to a rep.

In this new environment, salespeople were forced to become experts both in their own product lines and in their industries. When buyers turned to them, they had to provide sound, meaningful and helpful advice about what to purchase—it could no longer be just a sales pitch.

It was then that the clamor over CRM applications, especially from salespeople, reached a fever pitch. Salespeople truly needed an application they could count on, that mirrored their sales processes and help them briskly bring buyers from lead on up through closed sales. CRM had to be something that salespeople could really use, not just something into which they were required to enter mountains of data.

A whole new group of CRM companies heard the cries, and answered the call, some better than others. Suddenly CRM applications needed to become truly useful.

The Technological Drivers

While the buyer revolution drove CRM development from one side, the other side was driven by a most unlikely group of players: the digital natives that thrived in the gaming community. These people, mostly millennials, had come up in a totally visual world, and were now being employed as developers. They took one look at the bland, spreadsheet-like appearance of many applications and laughed out loud. They pointed at the incredible graphics being produced in games and asked, “Why can’t we be doing that for business applications?”

In fact this was one of the factors that brought about Pipeliner CRM in the first place. While I am not a digital native, I did myself (and my company) the favor of listening to them, and we designed a totally visual CRM solution. It is why digital natives such as Activision Blizzard COO Thomas Tippl says, “Pipeliner is a slick application.” Prior to these digital natives speaking up, no one would have ever considered referring to a business application as “slick.”

The question now becomes: Will CRM succeed in its new incarnation? Stay tuned as we explore this vitally important topic.

Looking for today’s CRM: Instant Intelligence, Visualized?  Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

G2 Crowd, the world’s leading business software review platform, has determined that Pipeliner CRM is the highest rated in satisfaction for CRM products, based strictly on user reviews. The recognition was stated as part of G2 Crowd’s ‘Best of 2015 User’s Choice Lists.’

“We are very pleased to recieve this rating based on customer reviews,” said Nikolaus Kimla, CEO of Pipeliner Sales, Inc. “We entered this market in the first place because we perceived that salespeople and sales managers were being weighed down by CRM instead of being empowered by it. This latest rating shows that we are indeed achieving our goal.”

Satisfaction with the product is indeed one of Pipeliner CRM’s top-cited benefits, as stated by customers. “I love the visual structure of it,” said Chris Collier, National Sales Manager for Whole Harvest Foods. “I’ve been in sales my entire life; I’ve never really done anything else. For me it visually portrayed what was going in my mind—and on my cocktail napkins, and backs of receipts, and backs of business cards. It took all of that and put it into a clear picture right there on my laptop, of what I actually was trying to visualize in my head.”

“It’s really the ease of use,” said Eric McDowell, National Sales Manager with S. Sterling Company. “I don’t know how else to put it. It’s very user-friendly the way that you set up an opportunity, add the contacts to the opportunity, and then start managing that opportunity within your activity calendar. Everything ties together very nicely. It’s not cumbersome in the least.”

Since its inception, Pipeliner has paid strict attention to the needs of users. The product’s tagline—“Instant Intelligence, Visualized”—is reflected in virtually every one of its features, designed to be totally intuitive and visual. It is the one CRM solution that, per reports from customers, salespeople actually enjoy using.

Satisfaction also shows in the company’s success. FY 2015 was ended at an astounding 106% over the previous year–the third year in succession that Pipeliner has doubled revenue year over year.

Find out why users are so satisfied.  Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.