Pipeliner CRM

Opmerkingen: My business is B2B. What I’m selling is voice training, workshops, and speaking engagements. Until recently, my business was developed through public relations, publishing in special interest magazines, and through people finding me through the website and social media.
About 2 years ago, I began to see a dramatic change. I needed more than a database and a bit of marketing automation -- I needed a sales process to help me drive interest and drive business. Competition was rising and it was obvious that I needed a more structured way to keep my contacts, accounts, and business relationships organized and vibrant. For both existing and new business relationships, I needed a way to nurture those relationships.
It became clear that all my business was not going to come to me any longer. I needed help selling to my key persons -- that’s when I looked for the right CRM tool. In the end, I found Pipeliner through searching on Google. I had asked colleagues and friends for recommendations, but the software they or their companies used was too unwieldy, complex, and expensive. c
Today I can say, Pipeliner helps me to stay in touch with the most promising customers and to make more business with less effort.

Pluspunten: The visual approach. I noticed right away that Pipeliner workes differently from other solutions. It is visual -- not dry spreadsheets but instantly understandable in pictures -- and intuitive. I don't need a thick manual. No need to think in ‘database structures’. Pipeliner shows me the sales process and how I move from stage to stage. Pipeliner ‘mirrors’ my behavior. I don’t have to understand all the technical workings -- I can just see what I need to know. I suddenly have an instant snapshot of my sales stages, what I need to do next, and this motivates me.
Also absolutely important and helpful is the integration of MS Outlook and the connection with several social networks.

Minpunten: There are only few things I dislike. One is, I miss the possibility to import vcf-cards when I am creating a new lead. Also would be good for me - as located in Europe - the integration of the Xing-Network.

Pluspunten: The overall experience of signing up and installing the client software is good and we have had no technical issues. Customer support is good and documentation is available for using and customising the interface. For example we wanted to add a margin value field to each qualified opportunity and although this was not a default field it was easy to find instructions as how to do it. The new field is calculated and can be used for graphs and reports so we can see relative margins against project values. Pipeliner lets you run more than one pipeline and we have two, one for new sales and one for existing customer development. This makes it easier for sales team to keep their workload balanced between the two activities. The management reports feature is extremely useful and enables our directors to quickly see how the sales team are progressing in terms of wins, losses, potential and actual sales.

Minpunten: Our directors want to encourage the sales team to add follow up actions after events. Unfortunately, you cannot add a telephone call or email as the follow up to a meeting. We have posted it as a feature request, but it is a surprising and pretty pointless limitation. Who wouldn't follow up a meeting with a phone call? It would also be nice if the pipelines could be colour coded as it can be difficult to know which one you are working in. Our only caveat is that should your internet connection fail and you carry on working, the 'auto-synch failure' alert is very small and easily overlooked. If you have to reboot the PC to solve the internet connection you will lose all the work added after the synch failure. We would like Pipeliner to auto-backup client data to the client PC which could be restored in the event of a synch failure.