Building a Business: From Dream to Live Action, and Everything In Between

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:

It Starts With a Dream…
Begin With That Team
Sometimes It Takes a Very Bold Move
The Precise Measure of Finance and Leadership
Power of the Virtual Office
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:

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

10 Don’ts for Social Media

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.

Network Selling: Guarantee Success For The Digital Age

Network Selling is a sales model we created several years ago, that expresses the ideal needed in today’s interconnected digital sales landscape. It is expressed in this graphic:

In this ebook, Nikolaus Kimla goes through each of the factors in Network Selling, fully explaining each.

Respect

We start with the very first element required in the Network Selling model: respect. Not just Network Selling, but everything in civilized life begins and ends with respect as the very foundation. Every good experience—be it social or business—depends on mutual respect for its success.

Empathy

The next step in Network Selling is a skill without which a salesperson just won’t survive in this 21st century digital selling environment. That skill is empathy. It is vitally important today because we’re awash in a giant overwhelming wave of technology. The internet, along with this vast technological tide, has created a world in which too many of us have become anonymous.

Trust

Trust is a crucial principle for just about anything—running a company, having a mutual relationship, any form of friendship, marriage, children or parents. And, of course, for sales. We can look at trust as a pyramid, with layers of blocks built one upon the other, over time.

Win-Win

Since the beginning of time, sales has had a tendency to be over- balanced on one side or the other—on the side of the seller, or on the side of the buyer. In a perfect world, the buyer’s best deal and the seller’s best pro t would somehow mesh in total harmony. But we don’t live in perfect world.

The Enjoyable Business Process

In this, our final chapter, we’re going to take up two steps of the Network Selling model: Business Process, and Enjoyable. They have been combined, for reasons which will soon be very clear.

Join us in this ebook as we go through all the factors of Network Selling—the only sales model for the digital age.

Sales Management Through Pipeliner CRM

In this ebook author, Nikolaus Kimla gets very specific, dealing with sales management through CRM. He personally believes (as do a lot of experts today) that utilizing a CRM is the only way to manage a sales team—and in fact, it is practically impossible to manage one without it.

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.

In this book, we break sales management through CRM down into 4 basic functions, with a chapter covering each.

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.

Come with us as we explore each of these vital parts of sales management through CRM.
Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

Sales and Marketing Alignment: Time To Get Serious!

We’re well into the 21st century—yet the subject of Sales and Marketing alignment still seems as pertinent today as it has ever been.

In many organizations, the frustrations seem to endure with every passing year. The age-old blame games are played out. Sales bemoan the quality of leads that Marketing is sending over, and Marketing decries the ability of Sales to close these self-same leads. With all this bemoaning and decrying going on, is it any wonder that the mere suggestion of trying to improve Sales and Marketing alignment is met with cynicism at best, and outright hostility at worst?

And technology, far from helping the situation, has too often simply automated or helped to make the dysfunction more efficient (if that is not oxymoronic but then again so much of this arcane conflict is). Now there is an excuse to engage less and hide behind the screen and push a few buttons rather than sit down and figure out what each group needs from the other.

Are we at last reaching that tipping point where we will all finally accept that changes in buyer behavior have driven a horse and carriage through whatever firewalls and lines of demarcation both Sales and Marketing have used as comfort blankets or excuses not to engage?

To try and answer this, we at Sales POP! engaged with some of the leading thought leaders in the Sales and Marketing space to discuss this subject. We hope this content inspires you to take a lead in your organization, and help both parties realize they need each other, they can help each other and together they are unstoppable.

Isn’t time to bury the hatchet (and not in each other’s backs, either)?

The Art of Customer Acquisition

Learn How to Get a 10% Conversion Rate from Outbound Sales with Customer Acquisition

Introducing our new e-book: The Art of Customer Acquisition

We wrote this because outbound sales is one of the easiest and quickest ways to acquire new customers and establish a dependable revenue pipeline. That said, it does require some knowledge gained from experience to be done right. You could gain this knowledge the hard way by starting from scratch and learning from your mistakes. After all, that is what we did. But since we have this knowledge, your other option is to take our what we’ve learned and start with an advantage.

Maybe you have been looking for a way to create a dependable revenue pipeline. Or maybe you have already established your outbound sales pipeline but have not been able to get the results you were promised. You can still benefit from what we’ve learned from sending over 80,000 outbound email campaigns.

The Art of Customer Acquisition is for anybody who wants to make more high-quality B2B deals using targeted email outbound sales.

You should be building an outbound sales pipeline right now. It is easy to set up, predictable, and scalable. It supports you other revenue generation efforts and you start to see results almost immediately. So we have produced this e-book so that you can see these benefits at your company.

For those of you who are just starting outbound sales, this book will provide you with all of the information you will need to create an outbound sales pipeline. If you already have started your outbound channel, this guide will provide you with the tips you will need to optimize your campaign to get the best results.

Download E book

Pain Points of Sales Management and How to Overcome Them

There are literally hundreds of pain points that plague a sales manager. In Pain Points of Sales Management, Nikolaus Kimla gives you a fascinating and insightful tour of the most important of these.

These pain points can be broken down into 3 categories:

Management
Technology
People

Throughout the book, pain points fall within one or the other of these categories.

Management

What kind of management methodology should be chosen to monitor and lead a sales team?

You’ve mostly likely seen that there are thousands of books available, each touting its own unique “sales management methodology.” But are there management principles which can be universally applied, in any culture, and in virtually any context?

As you’ll see in this book, the answer is “yes.” Instead of trying to evolve brand-new “sales management” techniques, we actually bring you sound management principles that have been proven through 150 years of practice. It is these same principles that have been applied in and through Pipeliner CRM. And, as you’ll see, “sales management” is actually “management” with some specialized practice. Great management methodology can be applied to any field.

Technology

Technology has become such an integral part of today’s business world that very few activities can be performed without it. One could even say that many endeavors are impossible without technology. That certainly includes sales.

There is some kind of technology tailored to every sales-related activity: lead generation, prospecting, opportunity tracking—all the way down to the simplest tool a salesperson puts to use: the call.

In that technology is mandatory, it then becomes a question of which technology you chose. You must evaluate: is it really helping the company? Or is it backfiring because people don’t like it, or it’s complicated, or it’s too expensive?

A good benchmark for the worthiness of technology is, “What should the technology do?” What is it for, what issues does it resolve, and how does it empower sales management and sales itself?

There really is no other approach. To try and decide on technological solutions before you’ve really examined all of your company’s requirement is seriously putting the cart before the horse.

People

Without people you have no sales team–hence this is obviously a very important category.

Because people are people, there are limitless issues associated with them, and we couldn’t possibly address them all. For the purposes of this book, we assume that your sales reps have been chosen, hired, trained and are now up and running. We’ll help you take it from that point.

Of course, the “people” category includes you, the sales manager, and there is much we’re going to assist you with. Most sales management is about reacting instead of acting. Much of this reacting comes in the form of firefighting—meaning, taking various sales away from salespeople at the last minute so that they can be closed quickly enough to make quota. It is something that can become a vicious circle, something you never get out of.

If you find yourself in this category, we’re here to put you in the driver’s seat so you can act instead of react, drive the car instead of being a passenger, and cease firefighting.

Here are some highlights from individual chapters of Pain Points of Sales Management:

Chapter 1: Sales Manager Pain Point #1: The Sales Manager

Sounds like a funny thing to say, doesn’t it? But it’s true. Of all the many pain points for a sales manager—and our research has turned up dozens—the first and foremost of these is the sales manager himself or herself.

Chapter 2 — Just How Important is Technology to Sales Management?

A key factor in a sales manager’s approach is technology. Without the right technology, the sales manager isn’t going to even have the data to view, let alone interpret and make decisions with.

Here are very specific guidelines for choosing and employing technology for sales management

Chapter 3 — The Pain Point of People

The first thing you must admit is just how difficult it is to change people. Ask yourself: Have you ever tried to really change someone? Then ask yourself: Did you succeed? If you answered “Yes,” great! But the vast majority would answer “no” to this second question. This is doubly true for trying to change someone simply and only on a professional level—in their job.

Chapter 4 — The First Thing a Sales Manager Must Know: Management

Most of the time, a sales manager becomes a sales manager by being promoted out of the salesperson position. A salesperson was a top producer on a sales team, and was then promoted to sales manager to run that sales team.

Sure, being great at sales helps—in fact, salespeople may not even listen to them if they aren’t—but that is only the beginning. There are many other skills a sales manager must have, chief among them being management itself.

Chapter 5 — “A Sales Manager Walks Into a Company…”

While it starts like many old jokes (“A sales manager walks into a company…”), to anyone who has been there, it certainly isn’t one. A sales manager walks into a company, is hired, and is expected to take the sales team—and the company bottom line—to new heights.

When a sales manager newly comes into a company and is faced with an existing sales team, he or she will be confronted with a number of pain points. This is a list of them, and roughly the order in which the new sales manager should handle them.

Chapter 6 — Making Accurate Sales Forecasting a Part of Sales Management

What is forecasting? It is doing your level best to accurately predict the amount of sales that will be closed during a particular sales period—month, quarter, half-year or year.

There are 2 main components to sales forecasting: the people, and the technology. Without technology accurate forecasting is pretty near impossible. But the other side of it is an understanding of people—specifically the people in your sales team.

Chapter 7 — The Lead Machine

Today lead generation has radically changed, due to the proliferation of the Internet. Because information on your product or service is now so freely available—along with that of your competitors—it is very easy for potential buyers to compare products. 60 to 70 percent of the decision making in B2B sales is made before the decision maker approaches the supplier. This has a profound impact on the lead machine.

Chapter 8 — Keeping That Customer—It’s Called Account Management

A question which any businessperson is going to ask after closing that first sale is: How can I keep that customer now that I have them?

The answers to that question add up to account management. It is the set of activities needed to keep your customers once you have sold them. Account management is critical because retaining and selling to an existing customer costs far less than pursuing and selling to a new customer.

Chapter 9 — For the Future, Sales Management Requires Virtues

Perhaps more than other more average fields, you really need virtues in sales management. The bottom line: if you don’t clearly understand how a sales manager needs to be poised for the future, you reduce the chances of creating value and growth. It is for this purpose I have laid out these virtues.

Getting To Yes!

Would you ask someone to marry you on a first date? Probably not. Admittedly, popping the big question to a stranger might seem like an extreme example, but if you’re hoping for a “yes” from a client, you’re in the same playing field.

The world is a cluttered, distracted place. Whether you’re trying to get yourself noticed at a bar or in the board room, there are five crucial rungs you need to climb to stand yourself apart from the noise, make your mark and score that YES.