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.

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

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

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 and generate their own leads. Lead management can be conducted with precision through Coevera, from lead assignment 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 contribute to happy customers. Account management is best conducted through a CRM.

Existing accounts are the foundation and source of stability for a company. Moreover, it is far less complex and costly to keep an existing account satisfied and happy than it is to generate 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 where generals, officers, and battle coordinators visually plan 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 meet 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, so they are all visually available, and all data is present.

The eBook was originally published under the Pipeliner CRM name. Pipeliner is now Coevera — same company, evolved identity.

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

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

The content in this ebook was originally published as a series of articles in Silicon Prairie News and was, and remains, 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. At that point, we thought, “What next?”

At this time, by total coincidence, Kimla was invited to an international conference hosted by IBM on sales pipeline management. The idea had 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 Coevera, Kimla and his team took a hard look at the answers to this question: what was the difference between Coevera 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 Coevera’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 Coevera’s goals was to make onboarding and implementation something companies could do themselves, without requiring weeks of specialized training. Today, learning Coevera onboarding takes a few hours. Coevera aimed to do the same thing for administration; today, Coevera administration is a very part-time job that can be performed by existing staff with a few hours of instruction.

Chapter 3: Finding an Industry Foothold

The original company in which Coevera 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 Coevera, 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 for Kimla to try to 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 future world markets would be in Asia, based solely 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 full story of this move is detailed in another ebook, Building a Business.

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

When Coevera had gained hundreds of customers worldwide with a very stable product, Kimla realized they needed a true mobile application. Coevera 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.

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

Mobile features now include innovations such as a business card scanner, text-to-speech, auto-population of data, full data visualization, calendar and email integration, 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, it 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.

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 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.

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

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 Coevera, one that empowers precision sales management through CRM. Therefore we can truly say that Coevera 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 Coevera, 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 Coevera now.