There is a lot of conversation circulating about building your personal brand. If you take a look online, you might see personal branding defined 1 as “the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands,” with terms like “self-packaging” thrown into the mix.

But, the discussion about personal branding is fairly superficial; what people are really talking about is having a digital brand. Digital branding can significantly influence how prospects view you, but it’s not the only thing that’s important when it comes to personal branding. There is a multi-facet process that starts with six impressions. Each impression forms an important piece of the puzzle to truly building a brand of gold.

In this ebook here is what you will learn:

1. Ensure that your digital presence is strong and as credentialing as it can be.
2. Spend time reaching out to people with written communication or over the phone, and make sure your messages are well thought out, respectful, and professional.
3. When you engage with a prospect, make sure that you know something about their business, and can speak about business in general terms.
4. Build trust in the relationship by being consistent, being honest, and following up.
5. Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes and use empathy to understand their world.
6. And finally, make sure that your deals end with a win-win outcome where both parties are happy. This is what it takes to build a brand of gold.

[icon name=”smile-o” class=”” unprefixed_class=””]And, oh yes, make it enjoyable!

So make sure you have got your brand covered in a holistic fashion and see what difference it makes to your interactions.

In this ebook, Nikolaus Kimla discusses the two pillars of the future are technology, and human beings and how you have to have the perfect technology, and then the perfect human being in application, performance, and presentation. He argues that today and into the future, it’s a 50-50 balance. In the past, it was perhaps 90-10 (90 percent human and 10 percent technology). It moved up to 80-20. Today, though, it’s definitely 50-50, and without technology, you’re lost. Today, technology is an equal partner. For that reason, character—the subject of his ebook—is even more important, for humanity has to be as good as the technology. This is especially true in sales.

Here’s something interesting to think about: how many bugs do you have on your smartphone? How many bugs does your car have (assuming it’s in good running order)? Your computer? You’ll realize they all have relatively few. But when you work with people, there are many! We expect the technology to be perfect, and today we absolutely need it. If we didn’t have that expectation—if we actually expected technology to be faulty—can you imagine what it would feel like to board an aircraft? Or get into your car to drive? With faulty technology, what would be the expectations of people about to go to Mars? If we’re working from home (which many of us are today), what if the technical infrastructure (the internet) only supported us part of the time? Or for Nikolaus’s own company—an SaaS business that operates in the Cloud—what would it be like if our Cloud provider didn’t work 99.99 percent of the time? We even have Service Level Agreements in place to guarantee it. So the expectation for perfect technology is definitely always there.

The same expectations will be applied to humans as regards manners, education, and social intelligence, more and more as time goes by. If we have a 50-50 balance of technology with humanity, and the technology is near-perfect, then the only failing can be humans. If you don’t meet the standard, you’re not considered functional in society. Humans will probably never be perfect—there will always be some problems. But we must work to eliminate the basic errors that cause so many troubles. While exact prediction is impossible, we should have a precise goal that a 9-month trip to Mars with total strangers won’t be a disaster before they even arrive.

How can we raise the perfection of the human being? And more to the point for us, of salespeople? The answer, Nikolaus offers, is character.

Being connected has always been a goal of humanity. In the beginning it only happened through personal contact, shortly followed by written messages such as letters. Coming into the modern age, we then had the telegraph and then the telephone.

The computer age eventually brought about the internet, which meant we were connected like never before—through email, chat and, today, videoconferencing.

There were other parts of interconnection, though, that have been slow to catch up. A prime example is interconnection between systems and programs—making applications work together has been a major challenge for IT departments and programmers, and for many years required detailed and skillful programming.

A later development was the application program interface, or API, which did make things easier, but APIs themselves could only map one system to another, and still required coding.

Today, however, we’re on the brink of a true revolution in application interconnection—no more barriers. Applications can simply be connected up and work together through a central hub. This ebook explains all of this in detail.

Going back to the earlier part of the last century, sales was traditionally fraught with—and seen as—trickery. It seemed that the most clever salesperson, the one who consistently got the highest numbers, knew how to manipulate prospects.

In the 1960s this began to change, when pioneers such as Zig Ziglar sought to raise the reputation of salespeople. His philosophy was to actually help a prospect, rather than use tricks to force a sale. Other sales methods followed that took similar tactics to be honest with customers and actually solve their issues.

Then the advent of the internet changed everything totally. Now a prospect could find out all about any company, and any salesperson, who was attempting to sell to them. Buyers could now conduct extensive research into a product or service before ever talking to a salesperson. And a company and salesperson’s reputation preceded them—they operated dishonestly at the risk of losing business forever.

Today sales truly is all about understanding the buyer: their pain points, their needs, their wants, their desires. Then it’s a matter of listening, and precisely delivering what will help them solve their issues.

It’s interesting that understanding and helping the buyer is something that the truly great salespeople have always done—but in today’s digital and highly competitive sales landscape it must be part and parcel of every salesperson’s toolkit.

In this ebook Nikolaus Kimla provides you with the basic essentials of knowing the buyer—what that means for the seller, the buyer, and meeting the buyer in the middle.

There is no system in the industry today like Pipeliner CRM, one that empowers precision sales management through CRM. Therefore we can truly say that Pipeliner CRM is the only really effective tool available today in the market.

Lead Management

In sales, it all begins with leads. There is always a sales quota to be made. A quota won’t be attained without adequate opportunities—and opportunities won’t happen without adequate leads.

Even with a good inbound lead program (which most companies have today), to truly guarantee their success, every salesperson should prospect, should generate their own leads. Lead management can be very precisely conducted through Pipeliner CRM, from lead assignment up through conversion to an opportunity.

Opportunity Management

At the very heart of running a sales pipeline is opportunity management. Opportunity management consists of, first, setting up a sales process. This means knowing the various stages that your opportunities pass through, from lead all the way to close. When you know how long a deal takes to make it through the pipeline, and how long it should take for an opportunity to make it through each stage of that pipeline, you’ve got a fairly accurate sales process.

Account Management

Account management is a considerable job—and one of the most important for a sales professional. Account management consists of several key functions, all of which actually add up to happy customers. Account management is most precisely conducted through CRM.

Existing accounts are the foundation and stability of a company. Moreover, it is far less complex and costly to keep an existing account satisfied and happy than it is generating new business.

For all of these reasons account management is a primary important function of an enterprise.

The War Room Concept

The War Room is a vital concept in sales management.

A physical war room, in the military, is a space in which generals, officers and battle coordinators visually plan out battle tactics and strategies for specific operations. In business the term has come to mean a meeting space built for the specific purpose of providing a dedicated location for stakeholders and project teams to share a location and visually communicate tasks and activities associated with the execution of critical projects.

Moving over to sales, the idea is to control and manage all of your sales resources in one location, in a way that they are all visually available and all data is present.

Pipeliner is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) product of which Founder and CEO, Nikolaus Kimla, is extremely proud of. It was and is the first CRM product developed to actually empower salespeople—prior to Pipeliner, a CRM was intended to control salespeople (and in many cases still is). Pipeliner is a true sales enablement tool.

How Pipeliner got there makes for an interesting story, and hopefully, anyone setting out to develop and market a software product can learn from Pipeliner’s own successful experience.

The content in this ebook was originally published as a series of articles in Silicon Prairie News, and was and is intended to educate anyone looking to develop their own software product. These are the lessons Kimla learned— and hopefully you’ll learn from them, too.

1. A CRM’s Genesis
2. Aiming for Industry Disruption
3. Finding an Industry Foothold
4. Coming to America, and the Development Explosion
5. Going Super Mobile, and the Future in the Cloud
6. The Future Revolution

Chapter 1: A CRM’s Genesis

World-Check was a huge success, but when it was sold we no longer had the intellectual property of it. At that point we thought, “What next?”

At this time, by total coincidence, Kimla was invited to an international conference put on by IBM on the subject of sales pipeline management. The idea had been evolved over many years and was very logical, so he was quite drawn to it.

After the conference, Kimla discovered that there was no product behind the concept, either existing or in the planning stages. So he came back to his team, and we thoroughly discussed the idea of a sales pipeline software solution. They decided to move cautiously ahead.

Chapter 2: Aiming for Industry Disruption

While developing Pipeliner CRM, Kimla and his team took a hard look at the answers to this question: what was the difference between Pipeliner and other CRMs? What would be the revolutionary approach? The answers were right there in , their initial research—they simply followed them.

At the time of Pipeliner’s initial development, CRM administration was a full-time job—often requiring more than one person in a larger company. Additionally, this administration required substantial training.

One of the goals for Pipeliner was to make onboarding and implementation something companies could do themselves, without requiring weeks of specialized training. Today, learning Pipeliner onboarding takes a few hours. Pipeliner aimed to do the same thing for administration; today Pipeliner administration is a very part-time job that can be performed by existing staff with a few hours instruction.

Chapter 3: Finding an Industry Foothold

The original company in which Pipeliner was created was an Austrian enterprise integration company doing quite well. They had a lot of success and knowledge—but weren’t a vendor.
When Kimla realized that he had, in Pipeliner, the beginnings of a real scalable product and not a service, he had to think through what to do. Kimla didn’t believe he could compete against the CRM giants like Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce.

It didn’t make sense to for Kimla to try and build a big vendor organization. Kimla says, “Americans may not fully understand this, but it really has to do with the mindset: Austria is a small country, and I wasn’t thinking that I had a product that could bring in billions in revenue. How could I get this product to market?”

Chapter 4: Coming to America, and the Development Explosion

At the time Kimla actually considered that the future world markets were in Asia, just based on growth. In the end, though, he decided to bring the company headquarters to America; if a product is released in the U.S., Asia will buy it, too. The same is true of Australia.

It wasn’t easy to pull up stakes and move, but that’s what he did. The whole story of this move is detailed in another ebook called Building a Business.

Chapter 5: Going Super Mobile, and the Future in the Cloud

When Pipeliner had gained hundreds of customers around the world with a very stable product, Kimla realized they needed a true mobile application. Pipeliner did have a mobile version, but they knew that if they were really going to be robust, they had to be native on iOS and Android.

Pipeliner’s native mobile CRM was released in 2016, and today reviewers are saying that they have the best and most advanced mobile CRM on the market. As with Pipeliner’s desktop version, they are constantly improving it— since its release Pipeliner has had an update almost every two months.

Mobile features now include innovations such as business card scanner, text-to-speech, auto-populating of data, total visualization of data, integration of calendar and email, customized fields, and much more.

Chapter 6: The Future Revolution

To say the least, technology is changing rapidly. For evidence we only have to look at GitHub, the web-based hosting service for contributive programming. Shortly after GitHub was developed in 2008, it had 2,000 users, and as of June 2018 has over 28 million. Technology can only make exponential strides with that number of talented people working on code.

Kimla believes we’re at the beginning of a titanic revolution in technology.

When people think about starting a small business from scratch, they rarely think of factors in the order that they need to occur. If you attempt to simply found a business without having these things in the right places, it is almost guaranteed that you’ll fail.

This book tells the story of how Founder and CEO, Nikolaus Kimla built his business. Every story is unique—and his certainly is, too. This is how Pipeliner Sales was built from nothing to an international company, and as he relates the details, he will point out the elements that should be part of building any business.

We hope you’ll be able to learn something from it and someday be able to tell your own story!

Here are the steps to building a business:

1. It Starts With a Dream…
2. Begin With That Team
3. Sometimes It Takes a Very Bold Move
4. The Precise Measure of Finance and Leadership
5. Power of the Virtual Office
6. At the Core, It’s All About Management

Chapter 1: It Starts With a Dream

It all begins with a dream. A legendary man, Martin Luther King, Jr., once gave a very famous speech: “I have a dream.” Dr. King articulated his dream so well that it propelled the Civil Rights Movement and Civil Rights Bill in the US, and it has carried down through the years since. This was the action of a dream becoming a wish. While a dream might be inspired, it is the wish that holds the power to carry one into action.

When it comes to building a business: you might have formulated that wish, to found a company, to create and sell a product or service. Then the question becomes: is this wish reachable within reality?

In making a wish come true, you need three things:

1. You have to thoroughly analyze its strengths, weaknesses, and dangers.
2. It must have a clear benefit for its consumers or users.
3. You’re going to need capital—either your own or
4. someone else’s.

Chapter 2: Begin With That Team

Building a company must be done step-by-step, and must start with great people. Consider the approach in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, in which the author states that you need to “seat the right people in the right places on the bus.”

It’s the same for a company, even if it isn’t nearly as long a span of time. Your vision, your cause, must become your team’s vision. When the Pipeliner Sales team began, they didn’t have any tangible product there. They had to go on total faith that they would get this product developed and on the market.

Chapter 3: Sometimes it Takes a Very Bold Move

The US wasn’t actually Nikolaus’ first choice. From his study within the Austrian School of Economics, he I could see that the real economic growth in the world was happening in Asia. His original decision was to go to Dubai. But the more he researched, he found that Asian companies buy products and services after they have been successful in the US. It was then Nikolaus realized that he had to come to America.

The next decision was, where in America? Nikolaus decided to come to Los Angeles—where Pipeliner Sales would be the only CRM here at the time. That was at the beginning of the boom in what today is called Silicon Beach, and after Nikolaus made the move, Snapchat showed up and Google established a big presence, and many more followed.

Chapter 4: The Precise Measure of Finance and Leadership

Right from the start any company needs liquidity. For that reason many companies, when they’re first starting off, seek venture capital.

No matter what your story is, no vendor, business partner, employee or independent contractor cares how you pay your bills. They’re only worried about if you pay your bills (meaning them). As long as you do, you’re in business.

Chapter 5: Power of the Virtual Office

All Pipeliner headquarters employees work from their own spaces, scattered all over the world. Meetings are virtual, with physical meetings conducted semi-regularly or when needed.

Pipeliner is not totally against offices—there is a large one in Slovakia for developers and another in West Palm Beach. But for their headquarters, it made far more sense to go virtual.

Pipeliner hires the best people right where they live, and connect them through technology.
It’s a totally scalable structure—it can grow to almost any size and still function with the same infrastructure.

The difference in cost is astounding and gives Pipeliner an incredible competitive advantage.

Legendary management consultant, author, and educator Peter Drucker once said, “If you really want to be competitive, innovate the future.” We have certainly done that.

Chapter 6: At the Core, It’s All About Management

At the heart of every company is how it’s managed—by which guidelines, and by what kind of philosophical principles.

There are certainly a lot of management approaches out there in the world. Some work well, others not so much. Many companies, when they first start off, aren’t really guided by an actual approach, but only by the addition of quality staff.

In the end management always has to provide, as the first priority, clear goals and objectives. “This is what we have to do. This is what we have to achieve. This is the goal we have to reach—let’s go together.” And they will only follow you when you exhibit natural authority and authenticity.

If you issue such orders and your team doesn’t follow you, then you’re probably a “general without an army.” Such a person is defined by their title, but not by their actions.

Ten Don’ts for Social Media: The Poster

Using social media is a great way to build brand awareness, but some cautions are in order. Here are 10 techniques that won’t work.

What you should not do on social media

For social media to be an effective part of your brand-building strategy, it’s important to pay attention to what not to do.

This poster covers the top 10 things you want to avoid when using social media to put your brand forward.

Highlights:

• Know what social media is intended to do — and what it isn’t.
• Know that social media is not the place for a sales pitch.
• Know that your bad mood through social communications lives forever.

Download this charming poster to remind you about the best (and worst) tactics for social communication.

Don’t Misunderstand Social Media

Social Media is a communication channel and NOT (!) a marketing channel. Why? Because it´s not a one-way medium but a channel for two-way (+) dialog.