Wouldn’t it be great to have a crystal ball that would tell you what your sales totals will be each month, quarter and year? Managing the business would be so much easier anticipating cash flow and profits. The problem is sales forecasts are usually less reliable than predicting the weather. Mark Denning, CPA and Author of “Drive Your Business to Financial Success” states in his book, “The key variables with the highest risk and level of difficulty to forecast our revenue and gross margin.” Why is that? The sales team knows about every sale and your CRM system has built-in forecasting reports and dashboards. Seems like everything should be clear as a bell, but we all know its’ not. Forecasting in the CRM relies on the data being entered. As we say in sales, guessing in equals guessing out. Which is also why I say, NO GUESSING.

Rather than use a crystal ball, here are seven ways to have 20/20 vision with your sales forecasting.

It all starts with being real

Find a healthy balance between stretching yourself to grow and being honest about the market, capabilities and follow-through record. I’ve worked with owners who simply like to set goals that shoot for the moon hoping their team will hit the top of the mountain. The problem is the goal is not real and everyone knows it, but they all play along throughout the year fudging their closing dates and sales stages to please the boss at the beginning of each month or quarter. If you keep the goals real and believable your team will be more honest in their assessment of closing dates and stages and will fight to reach the moon.

Make sure you have the resources to meet the forecast

I was privileged to watch a team of 30 great people moves their forecast attainment from 8% to 92% in one year. The new ownership of the business invested in infrastructure improvements that helped the team perform. Instead of working hard to make up for poor systems and products, the energy went into growing the business. The owners wanted growth and realized part of being real was helping people with what they needed. Do your salespeople have the tools like a CRM, smartphone, laptop or tablets? Do you allow them to purchase reasonably priced apps that improve production? Is the communication and systems between support departments flowing smoothly? Are your products and delivery resulting in referrals or customer service tickets?

Don’t leave it all up to the sales team, get other departments involved in sales forecasting

The last point made was about having the resources to attain your forecast. By getting more departments involved in the sales forecasting process you might discover what resources need to be added or changed to be on target. You’ll also gain more buy-in from support departments to help sales meet the goal.

Are salespeople afraid to be honest if things are slow?

This is a killer to forecasts. Honesty helps you make the right adjustments in your tactics so you can achieve the forecast. If people believe they’ll get belittled, you may hear more about a big deal they are working on that’s due to close any day now, or someday, or reality, never. This is where coaching with backbone and heart proves very useful. Don’t let people get away with giving up on their goal, but listen and coach them into how they can improve. Sometimes they might need support through marketing or service, as well as a better effort on their part. The main point is to believe in your salespeople and allow them to tell you “bad” news without repercussions.

Is your sales process one that is being practiced by all salespeople?

When you can add more predictability to how salespeople are working, the easier it is to manage performance. You don’t need to create sales robots without decision-making ability. I would suggest you have general milestones (sales steps and stages) and confirmations of buyer commitment that serve as indicators of a more qualified buyer. If you’re still basing your forecasting on how your salespeople “feel” about the deal…well, you know where that leads. Take time defining your sales process with checkpoints you as a manager can evaluate.

Make sure your CRM is designed well for your sales process and business so salespeople will find value in keeping the data current

This is where your forecasting reports come from and as I’ve been saying we don’t want to guess or covering of tale. The CRM can be a tool that adds accountability and a real-time status of where you stand against your forecast today and in the future. In addition, it’s a management and marketing tool to help salespeople close more business. If it’s more of a burden, you might consider looking at how you are using it and also examine if you have the right system. Things are very affordable today, especially if you’re growing sales. One way to keep it valuable is making sure they system integrates with your email platform so information can be synced or added easily into the CRM.

Make your goals and forecasts important to the sales team

Keep the forecast and results in front of everyone on a weekly or at least a monthly basis. When you recognize someone for sales attainment, tie it back to how they are doing regarding their forecast. In other words, acknowledge them for their sales results and what percentage they attained against their CRM Pipeline forecast.

When your sales team becomes one that is counted on to meet the sales forecast, budgeting and planning become so much easier. Why not try these ideas out and see if you can improve your sales forecasting vision to 20/20.

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 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.

Software review and matchmaker site, Software Advice, just completed a survey of over 300 CRM users. The resulting data is a valuable guideline for CRM developers, but more importantly we thought a recap of the survey and results merited a blog post because they mirror many of the discussions we have with prospects and customers of Pipeliner CRM. [Look for our soon-to-be-published Pipeliner CRM Everything Guide to Successfully Choosing a CRM Solution]

These results are interesting to our team because they help up put on the Analyst hat and take a dispassionate view of what our users need. Surveys like this help us confirm our conclusions and guide our roadmap. We want to point out this impartial third-party advice to you because it helps you make wise decisions about your CRM and your sales processes.

What’s surprising or important for you to know? Let’s dig in…

Respondents

The Software Advice survey crosses many industries, with the largest percentage of respondents (70%) representing small businesses with 100 or fewer employees. Medium businesses had the second highest representation at 18%. Manufacturing and Technology were the largest industry verticals surveyed, representing over ⅓ of the total.

This was especially interesting to us because our current focus is on helping small and medium businesses to streamline and simplify their sales and customer management operations. Further, this distribution very closely matches the Pipeliner CRM customer base.

Key Benefits of CRM

Seventy-four percent of those surveyed stated that improved data access was the biggest benefit provided by their current CRM system. Leading blogger, management consultant, and thought leader Brian Vellmure commented, “There are still millions of companies today [that] just need a centralized place to keep their data. It’s the lowest common denominator and the easiest value to realize.”

The Satisfaction Chart

Key Challenges of CRM

Look at the red in the survey responses, especially around sales forecasting and customer acquisition costs. This is surprising data… Less than ½ of all businesses surveyed were satisfied with their CRM’s sales forecasting (and had nearly the same dissatisfaction with customer acquisition).

What does this result mean for you in the bigger picture?

As this applies to sales teams, this statistic is shocking — Forecasting is arguably the main reason you are using a CRM in the first place. These are issues inherent to every sales team — and your CRM tool should help guide your activities.

Fifty-six percent of respondents picked customization as their top CRM challenge, with integration to key technologies (49%) taking a close second. Many also said that end-user adoption was a major (24 percent) or moderate challenge (34 percent).

This finding squares with the a vendor perspective that every product will not always play nicely together. The double-edged sword that accompanies the best of buying best-of-breed apps (cost savings, deep functionality, focused feature development, frequent updates, ease of use) is offset slightly by the fact that integration with other systems is sometimes suboptimal or even non-existent.

The same goes for system customization — where there almost always exists a tradeoff between customization and user experience, aka ease of use. To completely customize any CRM solution will require custom code– no way around this reality– which will jack up costs, time to market, and flexibility of the system going forward. I’d be very intrigued to learn more about the requirements of the 20% of respondents who felt System Customization was not a a challenge… Perhaps these answers are correlated too with size of business (and resources available).

Sales Forecasting and Acquisition Cost

When your team improves at sales forecasting, they focus on the right deals — putting their effort into tasks with the highest chance of success. In this way, forecasting directly correlates to customer acquisition cost. I would wager that many of the same respondents who are disappointed in their CRM’s forecasting capabilities are also giving low marks to their CRM customer acquisition capabilities — as their sales team is likely struggling with focus.

DISCLOSURE: At Pipeliner CRM, this was a top developmental priority from the earliest days, and a consistent competitive edge for us vs. other CRMs. We support workflow focus, which supports sales forecasting accuracy, which supports lower cost of acquisition (and also lower risk in your pipeline). A core value of Pipeliner CRM is that the central location of customer data, organized within an intuitive platform, leads to improved relationship management—claimed as the second-highest key benefit in the survey.

Social Media Investment

Social media monitoring was high on the list of important future investments in CRM technology for businesses. This reflects the trend of social selling in the sales landscape. Companies are increasingly aware of changes in the buyer’s journey and the need to interact in more meaningful ways through social channels.

As a first stage, most CRMs should have Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ support for both prospecting and opportunity management through social channels. These are new “table stakes” items that should only become more entrenched as companies continue to make investments in social.

SMBs Most Satisfied — Medium Business Least Satisfied

This is a very interesting trend which came as no surprise to CRM Essentials co-founder Brent Leary. “Small businesses feel they’re getting more bang for their buck,” he said. “There are a lot more CRM choices for them today than there were a few years ago. [These products] are more affordable, easier to use — and the subscription pricing terms are in line with what small businesses are looking for.”

Conversely Leary pointed out that midsize businesses are in the midst of expansion. As they grow, they gain a deeper awareness of what they really require of CRM and of their current system’s limitations.

Your Opinion Welcome

We’d be curious to learn about your own satisfaction of your current CRM, especially by business size. Would you agree with the survey sentiment here?

From an industry-wide vendor perspective, I’m very pleased to see that Security, Support and Instability/Bugs/Latency are effectively not a challenge according to these respondents. This is a good news story, whereby anyone deploying CRM is going to get a solid app. This confidence boost is largely a rising tide lifting all boats in this sector.

Click here for the complete findings of Software Advice’s Customer Relationship Management Software UserView 2014.

Contact management software is critical to the operation of any sales organization.

It is a new age of sales. The sales force are digging in and really find out about their prospects and their barriers, needs and wants.

This approach also greatly affects contact management, and the choice of a usable contact management software. Being able to follow the sales process and the buyer persona also means that contact management software must, above all, be flexible. Let me explain… (more…)

Pipeliner 5 puts essential sales tools at your disposal that help you gain better insights into your sales pipeline, and enable you to manage your sales process more effectively. The sales software makes sales teams more productive by automating, and facilitating repetitive tasks so salespeople can spend more time customer facing and less time administrating. (more…)