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.

Are you happy in your current sales position? Are you productive? Does making your personal and company sales quotas come easy? Accepting that there always will be down times, but feeling that the positive outweighs the negative in your job? Are you not sick of sales software built on a sales process that makes you look like a square?

If your answer is Yes to any of these questions, then DON’T read on.

Knowing when to fold your cards and move on is as much a key aspect of any well oiled sales process as it is important in your professional career in sales. I know the sales profession has a reputation for being somewhat transitory. Some salespeople change jobs frequently. My history is a bit different: I’ve tended to stay in the same place for a number of years, acknowledging the ebb and flow of this high-stress, fast-paced career. (more…)