Coevera Features and Functionality: Philosophy Into Action

Originally published under the Pipeliner CRM name. Pipeliner is now Coevera — same company, evolved identity.

All of Coevera’s features express sound business philosophy–and are designed to totally empower your sales force

Features and Functionality: Philosophy Meets the Real World

In our previous 2 ebooks, Theory Made Real and Reducing Risk, we demonstrated that Coevera is, in the real world, the sum total of sound philosophical business principles. Theory Made Real explored the 6 basic principles that form the foundation for Coevera, with examples of how they are expressed in the product. Reducing Risk laid out the Coevera Selling System, which follows the basic pattern of a sales process against the backdrop of the buyer’s journey, and how this, too, embodies the basic principles.

In this our third ebook in the series, we explore all the specific Coevera features—many of which are totally unique in the CRM market—and how each of these reflects the philosophy which inspired it.

Our goal with this book is to give the reader an understanding of the power Coevera can bring to a sales organization and business, and to provide a continuing overview of the principles on which any business is based.

Stage 1: Focus

The first stage of the Coevera Selling System, Focus, deals with:

Focusing reps on deals that matter
Honing in on specific aspects of the deals themselves
Focusing the buyer in on your solution

Under the heading of Focus are the Coevera features contained in this chapter:

Dynamic Contact Management
Effective, Efficient Leads Management
Pipeline View: Visual Key to Your Processes
Your Instant, Visual Sales Timeline
Archive: Understanding the Past is Key to Your Future
Coevera Profiles: It’s Your View
Template Designer: It Really Is Your CRM
Coevera’s Built-In Help

Stage 2: Engage

The second stage of the Coevera Selling System, Engage, means reaching out and touching this prospect, getting involved with their particular company and issues, and accomplishing the actions necessary to move them to the next stage toward a sale.

Under the heading of Engage are the Coevera features contained in this chapter:

Sales Activities—Your Path to Sales Success
Social Selling Made Easy
Tracking Sales Efficiency: Coevera Hit Rate Manager
Online or Offline: Full CRM Functionality
Notes Management and Integration
Apps Integrations
Coevera App Integrations
Auto-Profiling: Saving Hours of Admin Work
History Log: Tracking Changed Data in CRM
Sales Reports: See More to Sell More

Stage 3: Convince

At the third stage of the Coevera Selling System, Convince, you are convincing the buyer—and all decision-makers and influencers at the company acting as evaluators—that purchasing your product or service is absolutely the right thing to do. It is at this stage that the sale is made.

Under the heading of Convince are the Coevera features contained in this chapter:

The Coevera Task Board: A New Way to Work
Dynamic Target: Constant Focus
Smart Org Chart & Buying Center
Filters: Zeroing In on Deals That Count
Getting a Handle on Sales Velocity
Sales Dashboards—Insights On Demand
Customized Auto-Calculations
Sales Document Management
Microsoft Office Plug-In

Stage 4: Close and Cooperate

At the fourth stage of the Coevera Selling System, Close, your buyer has become a customer. Ultimately your aim is to move that customer into the next and final stage of the Coevera Selling System, Cooperate. At that point your customer has become an advocate—and is much more of a partner than a customer.

There are 2 final features that are particularly applicable to the Close and Cooperate stages of the Coevera Selling System:

Multiple Pipelines
Bulk Update Feature

Opportunity Management

Qualifying a lead might be a relatively simple task, but opportunity management is a bit more complex. Why? The stakes are higher: a salesperson is now going to invest valuable time into working the opportunity. It has the real potential of becoming what everyone in the sales force is after: a closed sale.

Everyone is betting that this opportunity will pay off, but there is always that risk factor. Not all sales close. Will this one turn to profit, or become expensively wasted effort? How can the odds be improved in favor of your sales force and your company?

The essential key to opportunity management is accurately evaluating the risk factors. That is, knowing all about your target prospect company—at the very least understanding the industry and how most companies within it operate. Knowing which employees within a company are vital to engage as part of the selling process; having an understanding of your target company’s buying process; and of course knowing all the qualifying questions to ask before you invest serious time and effort.

Chapter 1: Sales Techniques – Opportunity Management

Qualifying a lead is relatively simple. Opportunity management, however, is a bit more complex. The stakes are higher: a salesperson is now going to invest valuable time into working the opportunity, engaging key people at the target company, making presentations, and utilizing all possible sales techniques.

Chapter 2: Sales Strategies and Opportunity Management: Knowing the Buyer

The key component of all sales strategies is opportunity management. And the key element of opportunity management is evaluating risk—having as much information as possible to outweigh the possibility of the sale becoming a loss.

Chapter 3: Sales Techniques: Sales Rep Flexibility

The time has come to let salespeople utilize their “on the ground” judgment and sales techniques when it comes to making various decisions about opportunity management. Selling today requires flexibility, judgment, and a focus on results—not process.

Chapter 4: Sales Strategies: Analysis of Lost Opportunities

If sales management or even members of the sales force can statistically analyze past losses as part of opportunity management, such analysis can yield plentiful data that is helpful to the creation of new sales strategies, helpful to the improvement of closing ratios and helpful to taking time out of sales cycles.

Chapter 5: 6 Vital Qualities of a CRM Solution in Opportunity Management

A CRM solution is crucial both to the operation of a sales force and, factually, of a business itself. But as a sale travels further up the pipeline, the precision of that CRM application increases in importance. By the time you’re well into opportunity management—that stage of a sale in which a sales rep is heavily engaged—your CRM solution had better be fully supportive or you run the risk of losing those opportunities.

Chapter 6 Sales Techniques: The Viewing of Opportunities

While the handling of sales opportunities is a technical subject that we explore in some detail, there is an underlying factor that affects any salesperson’s opportunity management: the way an opportunity is viewed.

Download our ebook Opportunity Management now.

Metrics and the Art of Sales

Is Sales an Art or a Science

It’s an age-old argument that still persists today: is sales an art or a science? The old timers will firmly argue the former, and the modern-day salesperson armed with the latest smartphone and steeped in technology will often argue the latter. But the truth is, that both are true for a sales force – but only in the right combination.

A sales rep today is armed with plentiful technological assistance. But he or she still must be able to rapidly relate to a prospect and engender trust, know when to pitch and when to hold back, and be able to read the prospect well to ascertain when to go in for that close or when to address other issues.

The job is far easier with the pattern of an agreed-upon sales process, an intuitive CRM solution, and instant access to an infinite amount of data through the web – but in the end it is still ability and skill that will bring the sale finally to its close. A sales force operates with both art and science. A skillful combining of the two will mean steadily increasing sales for your company.

Make the Metrics of Sales Work For You

Managing a reliable sales process is undoubtedly one of the most important functions of a sales leader. All you need to do is gather the data, right?

In actuality it is not enough to rely on sales process metrics alone. Those metrics must also have context — and especially a relationship to each other so you can put them to work for you. In this eBook you will learn:

How sales process metrics have changed over the last decade
How to measure each and every step of the sales process
How to understand and leverage the context of your sales process metrics

Download this free eBook and and discover some great tools for effective sales process measurement and control.

A good part of the reason you want a sales process is so you can actually view and measure the progress of sales as they go along, and monitor sales rep performance. Without a sales process, the only real measure of success you have is the total number of sales closed and the total dollar figures.

1. Is the Sales Force Running on Art…or Science?

In the end it can be seen that a sales force is operating with both art and science. A skillful combining of the two will mean steadily increasing sales for your company.

2. 4 Ways to an Accurate Sales Process

If you look back through business history, the evolution of the sales process was an attempt to adapt the methodologies of manufacturing or computing to sales. Essentially you have certain inputs that go through a specific process; given the same inputs and the same process you should end up with the same results every time.

3. Sales Force Automation and ROI

Due to these considerably reduced costs, it would seem that the question of rapid ROI has been solved – or has it? Taking a closer look, it will be found that evaluating CRM ROI is just as important as it ever was, perhaps even more so. It just has a different set of factors necessary for evaluation than it once did.

4. Sales Process Metrics: Know Your Context

Take the one final step and understand the full context of sales process metrics – and raise the number of closes consistently into the future.

5. Sales Process: Measuring “Now” Versus “Then”

You need to be able to accurately measure progress through each step of the sales process (sales pipeline) in order to fully control and predict sales. Additionally such measures have to show what’s happening now as opposed to only reviewing what happened last quarter or last year.

6. CRM Solutions: The Sales Force and Beyond

A flexible, intuitive CRM solution is crucial for a sales force to survive, let alone succeed. But that same carefully chosen and well-implemented CRM application is just as important to other key company departments whose input comes before and after sales.

10 Reasons Why Salespeople Will Always Be Absolutely Essential: The Printable Poster

Salespeople Are Genuinely Invested in Their Companies’ Doing Well

The Coevera blog post by sales expert Tony Hughes inspired this poster.

In the post, Hughes contends that free enterprise selling makes the world a safer and more tolerant place. He argues that selling connects people, exchanges ideas, and improves the way everything is done in the world.

The poster celebrates the idea that selling causes us to understand other people and their cultures, values and beliefs, but in a way where we have empathy rather than judgment.

The poster focuses on how:

Salespeople drive our economy.
Salespeople display unique, valuable attributes.
Salespeople inspire positive social change.

Download this poster and join us in celebrating Tony Hughes’ passionate words! Put it on your wall for all to see!

Leading and Lagging Indicators: The Key to Efficient Sales Management

Using the Right KPIs

The use of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is nothing new in business or sales. But if your KPIs are only of the lagging variety—the kind that shows the final results, such as gross sales, net revenue, or products sold—you’re missing out on the entire field of prediction.

This white paper explains how sales management must be conducted through the right combination of leading and lagging indicators, so that management is precise, and catches errors or issues well before they affect your final results.

KPIs are needed which help predict what those lagging indicators will be. These are called leading indicators, and they—along with their skillful combination with lagging indicators—are the subject of this white paper.

Nikolaus Kimla
CEO of Pipelinersales Inc.

The Combination of Leading and Lagging

The combining of leading and lagging indicators give you a full picture of your operation. Moreover, the combination gives you a comprehensive look at your risk, and allows you to make changes to improve the scene before your lagging indicators come into effect.

You should be able to utilize your leading indicators to show how your lagging indicators are going to appear, if nothing changes between now and the time of your lagging indicators. For example, if you add up the value of your opportunities in the pipeline, the percentage chances of their making it through, the rankings of each deal, and other leading factors, you see that, if all goes according to plan, you’ll have $1.5 million for the quarter. If you add up all your leading indicators and see that you’re falling short of your target, you then have time to do something about it.

Lagging Indicators

Far too often, sales management is conducted strictly with lagging indicators. A clue to the problem with analyzing and managing only through lagging indicators is right there in the name: lagging. It means, “what has already happened.” By the time lagging indicators become clear, it is too late to change anything.

But in managing for the future, we need something that will show us how the activities we are engaging in now will impact our figures for the quarter or the year.

Leading Indicators

Which leads us to the other kind of KPIs: leading indicators. Leading indicators could be said to be the KPIs that come between the big lagging-indicator victories.

The Combination of Leading and Lagging

The combining of leading and lagging indicators give you a full picture of your operation. Moreover, the combination gives you a comprehensive look at your risk, and allows you to make changes to improve the scene before your lagging indicators come into effect.

You should be able to utilize your leading indicators to show how your lagging indicators are going to appear, if nothing changes between now and the time of your lagging indicators. For example, if you add up the value of your opportunities in the pipeline, the percentage chances of their making it through, the rankings of each deal, and other leading factors, you see that, if all goes according to plan, you’ll have $1.5 million for the quarter. If you add up all your leading indicators and see that you’re falling short of your target, you then have time to do something about it.

Lead Management for Sales

Today astute companies have begun to institute ways to evaluate, categorize, and nurture leads before sending into the sales pipeline. In this way, any communication or outreach by a potential customer can be handled efficiently – and every potential lead can be properly identified and passed on to the sales team.

A lead can fall anywhere between “hot” (ready to buy) and “cold” (maybe once interested but has apparently moved on). A company that fully analyzes its sales process places these varying degrees of leads into precise categories indicating their viability. Successful methods of moving them along these categories are found and when they finally arrive at “hot” they are then and only then forwarded to sales reps to work.

Chapter 1: Lead Generation: The Call to Action

The call to action is the most important element of any lead generation activity. It is the part of your email, web page, landing page or other device that causes the reader to act (hence the name).

Chapter 2: Lead Generation: Sowing the Field

The internet dramatically changed yesterday’s lead generation scenario. Today a buyer will conduct extensive online research into your product category, comb through third-party product comparisons and evaluations, scope out trade shows, and interact with other buyers in forums and social media. Any promotion they might receive from you will likely hit the round file (virtually or literally) as they’re busy making up their own minds using their own sources.

Chapter 3: Lead Generation: Purchasing Lists for Leads

Today it is common to leave sales reps doing what they do best: closing sales. The job of lead generation is left to Marketing. As anyone informed will tell you, leads is a quantity game: The more prospective targets you can reach out to, the more leads you will get back. It often happens, then, that marketing will purchase lists of potential prospects instead of manually trying to seek them out, then isolate and promote to them.

Chapter 4: While You’re Home With Your Family, Your lead Generation Machine Rolls On

It used to be that businesses owners would sweat the holidays: leads and sales were not being made. But on a holiday, while your employees are enjoying time with their families, at least your lead generation machine can keep right on chugging—thanks to the internet.

Chapter 5: Lead Management: Nurturing the Leads

Today astute companies not wishing to simply waste the leads they get—whether super hot or lukewarm—are instituting ways of nurturing leads before sending them onto sales. It is part of an overall lead management system that makes it possible to utilize nearly everything that comes in the door.

Chapter 6: Lead Management: Five Cold Calling Basics

Today cold calling is normally done as a part of lead management. This calling is frequently done by an inside sales rep to qualify and make the lead “hotter” before sending it to a sales rep who will be going for the close. Nonetheless there is still a very narrow window in which to interest them, and an inside salesperson must have some basic operating actions and skills to bring prospects up to being “sellable.”

Download our ebook Opportunity Management now.

The Vital Importance of Metrics in Sales Management

The sales manager’s job is arguably the the most difficult and demanding in a company. From above, the sales manager is being monitored and pressured to get those sales. From below, salespeople are looking to the sales manager for leadership, while at the same time harboring a bit of criticism because the sales manager isn’t out there selling on a daily basis.

One of the primary differences between success and failure in sales management is having, knowing and using the right sales metrics. These metrics must reflect:

Past and present sales of each rep, and predicted future sales for each rep for the sales period
Past and present sales for each sales group, and predicted future sales for each group for the sales period
Past and present sales for whole company, and predicted future sales for the company for the sales period
These metrics need to be the most reliable available, for the purpose of managing and predicting sales.

In this white paper, we explore:

The importance of both inbound and outbound leads, why there should be a balance, and the basics of tracking and measuring them.
The value of lead scoring, the criteria you create for scoring, and how it is accomplished.
How to figure out how many leads you need in your pipeline at any given time
Managing opportunities, and calculating their priority and value
Precisely calculating the number of opportunities needed to make a target
and much more!

Along the way numerous examples are utilized so that you can see how these metrics can be immediately applied to your sales pipeline.

Leads

The sales process for any organization begins with leads—for without leads (and an adequate number of them) there are no sales. No sales, no revenue, no revenue, no company. So it’s quite obvious that leads are of prime value.

Inbound vs. Outbound

There are 2 main categories of leads: inbound, and outbound.

Lead Scoring

The next set of metrics comes about in lead scoring.

Number of Leads Needed

Concurrently, you’ll need to know how many leads it takes to keep your sales machine viably up and running, as well as succeeding and making its targets.

Opportunities

Once leads convert to opportunities, then it is a matter of figuring out how many winning deals it takes to profitably sustain the company’s pipeline, and monitoring that.

Proper sales management begins with metrics…and proper use of metrics begins with this white paper. Download it and start using it right away.

Is Cloud Computing Right for Your Small Business?

A question in the minds of many businesses these days is: Should we move our business computing operations to the cloud, or should we “stay on the ground?” What are the benefits? What are the risks? Is it safe? Is it cost-effective?

Research has found that the decision for any business to move IT operations to the cloud centers around CRM—primarily because prospect and customer information comprises much of the data storage for a large number of companies.

If your are seriously considering moving your CRM—and overall IT operations—to the cloud there are a number of important issues to evaluate.

Chapter 1. How Secure is a Cloud CRM Solution?

When considering a cloud CRM solution—or a move to the cloud in general—many companies still have a concern over security. Despite these concerns, the move to the cloud continues to grow. What is the truth of the matter?

Chapter 2. How Safe is Your Data?

With data being potentially stored off-shore, potential data ownership issues, and even concerns over safely transferring data, concern over data safety certainly isn’t a minor issue. But as with other cloud CRM concerns, it can be seen that as long as you do you research and make sure to clarify certain aspects of your cloud CRM service agreement, these concerns can be alleviated with relative ease.

Chapter 3. Should You Worry About Service and Performance Levels?

In today’s highly competitive business environment, the last thing a company needs to worry about is the sales force not being able to instantly save to or access data from CRM. Hence a common concern about moving to a cloud CRM is the worry about poor cloud service, slow performance, and outages or interruptions.

Chapter 4. Cost Benefits

Part of the debate over the move to a cloud CRM solution centers around costs. Since data hosting costs comprise a significant portion of any company’s budget, it well behooves an organization to research this point thoroughly and learn the whole truth of the matter: is it more cost-effective to retain data resources on-site, or to move to the cloud?

Chapter 5. Scalability: A Crucial Advantage for a Cloud CRM Solution

If you’re in business, one of your primary objectives is, of course, to grow. As you do, you’ll need your computing resources to keep up: processing speed for larger amounts of data, increased storage space, and applications that can keep up with the demand. It is in this realm that a cloud CRM solution can be of major benefit.

Chapter 6. How Customizable is Your Cloud CRM Solution?

One concern that can come up in deciding on whether or not to move to a cloud CRM solution is, “Will we be able to customize CRM?” It’s a valid concern; a CRM solution should be as tailored to a company as a suit would be customized to the wearer. With CRM, there truly is no “one size fits all”—despite the approach of many traditional CRM developers.

Download Is Cloud Computing Right for Your Small Business? now.