Think Pipeline - PipelineDeals CRM

New Update: New & Improved Notes

pipelinedeals — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:37:58 -0500

Improved Notes Displayed

Launched this weekend, a new and improved notes display for your deals, contacts and leads.

Viewing Note Content

You no longer need to click to see the notes content. A preview of the note will display on the page. Click on the more link to expose the full contents of the no

Associated Contacts

You will see the associated contact of the note at the end of the note displayed in bold text. You will see the associated deal if you are on the contacts profile page.

To Edit Notes

Simply click the note to open the edit form.

To Delete Notes

Simply click the trash can icon.

To See Notes History

Click show more notes to display older notes

PipelineDeals at New York Entrepreneur Week on 11/16

pipelinedeals — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:39:12 -0400

New York Entrepreneur Week (NYEW) is coming to New York City November 16th through the 20th. The five day event has a line up of speakers tailored for companies of different sizes and stages. The content for the event is broken down in a way to be as relevant as possible to where you are as an entrepreneur: Start-Up and Idea-Stage, Early-Stage, Growth-Stage and Acquisition & IPO. The ticket pricing is extremely reasonable and is designed such that it is cheaper for entrepreneurs to attend. NYEW is a non-profit with the focus on putting entrepreneurs in touch with people and ideas that can help them achieve their goals. This approach frees the event to be able to be organized based on principle rather than profit. We really liked the NYEW philosophy and were excited to jump in and help out.

To that end, PipelineDeals Co-Founder JP Werlin will speak on Monday (11/16) afternoon as a panelist on bootstrapping. PipelineDeals has toiled away the last 3 years financing the company on its own means and is happy to share our lessons learned and give back to those just starting out. If you can make it to one or more of the events, please do as it is bound to be a fantastic five days. Also, please do say hello or if you would like to schedule some time while JP is in New York, please email us at customercare at pipelinedeals dot com. We hope to see you there!

Balance: Livestrong Day 2009

pipelinedeals — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:58:26 -0400

This afternoon we are taking a half a day for Livestrong Day 2009. For our office in particular today has a personal meaning. Two of our team members have lost their Moms to cancer: Debbie Ammons and Cay Galgon. Today's Livestrong 2009 Ride for Moms will not only show our commitment to the Livestrong Movement but celebrate the legacy that these two women left behind.

Ride with us!

Please donate to the Lance Armstrong Foundation. More importantly find a way to bring the Livestrong movement into your world. The founder and chief instigator of this movement, Lance Armstrong, sets big goals. We all know Lance's accomplishments on the bike, but as he puts it: "It is not about the bike". Only someone as bold as Lance would have the audacity to set a goal to "End Cancer". As history has shown, never doubt Lance. And Lance teaches us in turn, that we should never doubt ourselves. Follow Lance's example and set some big goals for yourself including joining us in the global movement to end cancer.

5 Tips for Customizing your Account

pipelinedeals — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:29:38 -0400

We frequently get questions from new and existing users hoping to gain more insight from their business development pipeline. Sometimes its not easy to know where to start. We put together a list of five things to consider customizing when configuring your account with PipelineDeals.

1. Define a Unique Sales Process.

  Administrators can set up distinctive sales stages relevant to your business. Each account starts with a example sales process that can be modified. Defining a set of stages that are unique to your sales process will help you track you Deals in a meaningful way. We generally recommend keeping things simple.

  Typically, Deals mature from one stage of your process to the next on their way to being Won.   

When setting up your stages we will ask you to associate a probability to each one. The probability will help you sequence the stages and forecast your revenue. As Deals get closer to being Closed, the probability that they will be Won will increase.

  These examples are taken from the set up page. Deal Stages will display on the Deal’s Page, on the Dashboard of your Homepage, and in Reports.

Below are three examples you can review:

2. Create Sources for your Relationships.  

Sources are the origins of your business. When you add Leads into your account, you can track where they come from by assigning them a Source. Some examples of Sources we see frequently include Tradeshows, Cold Calling, Marketing Campaigns, and Referrals.

  Sources will help you track which marketing initiatives or Sources are driving your bottom line.   Below are several common source lists.

3. Use Note Categories.

  As you keep track of your correspondence is can be tricky to remember with whom, when and where you discussed certain things. Using Note Categories can help you organize and track specific types of communication. You can add as many Categories as you want to organize your Notes.

  Note Categories also run a powerful activity report that will help you answer questions like: How many calls were made this month? Last Month? How many Appointments has my sales rep Kevin conducted?  

Here are several ways Note Categories are used to help companies capture unique data related to their business development correspondence.  

Once you activate Note Categories you will be prompted to select one when you write Notes for your Leads, Contacts and Deals.

4. Create Deal Custom Fields.   

Setting up Deal Custom Fields can provide a very simple and powerful way to track your sales pipeline. You can now create up to 25 specific fields to organize your business Deals by unique attributes. For example, you can create pick-lists of Products or Services you sell and even track by Region. Currency fields can help capture other revenue streams and you can even apply date fields to track contract renewals.

  These special fields can then be used in a report to gain optics into your sales pipeline in specific ways.

  Your Deal Custom Fields will live on the Deals page below the Deal Summary values. You can arrange their order and even make fields mandatory to ensure your team adds values into them.

  In this example, six custom fields have been set up to track Deals.

5. Customize your Colors.  

With PipelineDeals you can customize your account to match your company colors and even upload your logo.

  Begin by selecting a theme that comes close to your color scheme. Then upload your Logo. We will automatically resize images to fit in the allocated space. To get the most out of your account you should follow these simple design suggestions:

Match the background of your logo to the color of the bar on the top of the page.
Use a lighter color to differentiate the tabs from the top bar.
Make sure your top links are visible and obvious.

  Below are several examples of what can be accomplished.

Just Released: New Features to Manage your Contacts and Sales Leads

pipelinedeals — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:47:02 -0400

PipelineDeals will soon be making some important improvements to Contacts and Leads making it easier than ever to manage your sales relationships.

The Contacts tab is getting a face-lift and some powerful new functionality. You can still easily find your contacts by using our simple search for queries on First, Last or Company Name.

Below you will see an example of a search for all Contacts at the Nike Corporation.

If you need something more thorough, you’ll now be able to use an advanced searching framework on the Contacts tab. This will enable you to find Contacts based on multiple attributes and even save the searches for future reference.

For example, you’ll be able to pull a list of all your Contacts who live in Colorado, who like to Ski, Kayak, and Hike and are owned by a specific user in your team. This new functionality will also help you segment your contact database to more effectively market to your customers.

Along with these more robust search features you’ll notice some new enhancements on Contact and Lead profile pages.

These profile pages are dedicated to a single person. We’re introducing some new fields so you can store more details about your sales relationships. Finally, we are also including the ability to upload profile pictures to easily distinguish your relationships.

The new fields include: 

Email Address 2
Twitter name and link
LinkedIn name and link
Facebook Name and link

Finally, managing your Contacts and Leads will be faster than ever. We've put all the actions you can take with your relationships into a navigation bar on the top of profile pages. You are now one click away from editing all contact details, converting a relationship to a Deal and more.

Please see the image below of a Lead Profile page. Now, all the functions previously available on the Leads Worklist are here as well. You can re-assign a relationship, set its status, delete it and more.

Simple CRM is about giving you the most intuitive and powerful tools to track your relationships and business pipeline. We've been listening to user feedback and look forward to hearing what you think about these new features.

Business Wisdom from Jeff Bezos

pipelinedeals — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:40:24 -0400

Recently Amazon.com bought Zappos.com as part of its growth strategy. While the transaction is interesting in its own right, one of the aspects I really enjoyed was the video below from Jeff Bezos. Jeff imparts some very good business wisdom that is applicable to almost any business scenario. I always appreciate the ability to hear from successful business people and apply it to our business. Whether you are part of a sales organization, the founder of a start-up or just looking for ideas on how to grow and improve your business, this is a helpful video. The key points Jeff makes are:

Obsess over Customers
Invent (on behalf of your Customers)
Think Long Term

Two things about his key points are telling (1) Customers are explicitly mentioned in two of the three points and (2) thinking long term is harder than it sounds as it runs contrary to the unfortunate quarterly mentality which many business are compelled to subscribe.
Here is the video - I hope you enjoy it:

New Features to Report on your Marketing Programs

pipelinedeals — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:01:52 -0400

PipelineDeals has recently made some simple improvements to the Deals page to give users more accessibility to key functions.

We’ve replaced the Deal Actions drop-down menu with an Actions bar at the top of the page. The Deal Actions Bar enables users to Share, Archive, and Delete their Deals. These functions are now always visible and can be used by clicking the corresponding links.

Below is a screenshot of the new Deal Actions bar.

The Deals Actions bar shows options based on user roles. Account Administrators will see all possible options including the ability to Modify Dates and Back Date Deals.

This improvement empowers Executives and Managers by providing functionality from the Deals page to Re-Assign responsibilities within the page. For example, you could easily change the ownership of a Deal from one colleague to the another.

Basic users only see the functions they have permission to use including the ability to Share, Archive, Set a Source and Delete.

As part of these changes, we’re now exposing the Source of the Deal. Previously, sources were appended to relationships attached to Deals.

Sources are the origins of your leads and relationships. Some examples of Sources include Referrals, Advertisements and Trade Shows. You can set up Sources by logging in as the Administrator and clicking on Manage Sources. You can also apply a cost to your sources. We support either a Cost per Lead (CPL) or One Time Fee (OTF). A Trade Show or Advertisement would probably be a one time fee or lump sum.

When you convert Leads to Deals, you will be asked to confirm the source of the Deal. Applying sources to your leads and deals will help you and your team ascertain which marketing programs are driving business and which channels you should invest more resources into in the future.

New Reports

The Source Report and the ROI Report will provide you and your team the active and closed marketing intelligence you need to make the best choices possible to drive new business.

Use the Source Report to filter your sales pipeline by origin. This report can help you answer questions like:

How effective is that Bulk Mail Campaign?
Is our website driving any business this quarter?
Which marketing channel has contributed the most overall revenue?

In this example, the report is filtered on Won Business from the Networking Event.

The ROI report aggregates your marketing data and puts it into one place. Here you can see how many Deals in your Pipeline are attributed to each source as well as check overall revenue by source.

Finally, it will also show you the return on investment calculated:

( Revenue/ Costs ) x 100

Important Notice: For Deal Tags Users - Changes Launching Soon

pipelinedeals — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:37:35 -0400

Please read this post if you are a current user of deal tags and the deal tags report. We will be launching several important changes soon.

Deal Tags Entry

Deal tags will no longer be on the bottom of the deals page. They will display in the new Deal Details section. You can also change a deal tag to be required entry.

You will be able to add new custom fields to your deals as mentioned in a prior blog post which will all display in the new Deal Details section at the top of the page.

Deals Directory Changes

There will no longer be a deal tags list for filtering in the Deals Directory. Instead you will be able create the same list as before by simply typing a tag name in the search box. For example, if you were used to working through a tagged list of deals for "financial services" or a specific region "Asia", or any tag, simply type it into the search box.

You will see a list of all deals associated with the tag. In the example below, you can see all deals associated with the tag "Technology". The search feature will also work with any picklist field type and values.

Deal Tags Report

The current deal tags report will move to the new Custom Reports section within Reports. You will be able to do advanced filtering as well as save queries off of the report just as before. You could also create variations of the report with less columns, or additional custom fields.

Deal Tags Maintenance

Deal Tags maintenance will now be done in the Setup Deal Custom Fields section in the Admin Tool. You can rename the label Deal Tags, add new picklist values, as well as add new fields to the deals page. You can also make the fields mandatory entry.

Preview #2 - Powerful New Features to Manage Your Sales Pipeline

pipelinedeals — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:47:54 -0400

In the last blog post, we previewed adding custom fields to your deals page giving you new power to your sales pipeline. Today, we are previewing the ability to create custom reports so you leverage the new power of your deal custom fields.

Custom Reports

You will now be able to build and save your own custom report based on your deal data. In the example below, I added several new fields to my deals page:

Product Interest
Industry
Regions
Delivery Date
Services $
Forecast $

With the custom reporting feature, you can build a report with up to 10 fields from the standard deal fields as well as your custom fields. You can have the columns in any order, and you can filter on any combination of the fields.

So, let's say you wanted to create a report to see all of your deals for a specific product or service, or a within a specific industry, or a specific region, or any combination, you would be able to do that with our new custom reports feature.

Preview #1: Powerful New Features to Manage Your Sales Pipeline

pipelinedeals — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:13:18 -0400

PipelineDeals is excited to announce some important new changes coming to the Deals page.

New Custom Fields for Deals

PipelineDeals will soon allow you to add custom fields directly to your deals page. Fields can be any of the following types:

Numeric
Currency
Text
Picklists
Dates
Forecast

How can you take advantage of this feature?

We have received many requests from our customers who just want to add one (1) additional field to their deals to track additional revenue $ in their sales pipeline, or several additional fields that are unique to their industry. We have supported the latter in the past with our deal tags feature.

Slice and Dice Your Sales Pipeline

This new feature will allow you to capture and track data for your sales pipeline along any dimension that you can think of - for example you could add deal fields to track:

Geographic Region
Product or Service Interest(s)
Competitor
Total Revenue Potential
Forecast Amount
Commissions

Simply create a new field, give it a name, define some pick list values and apply it to your deals. You will also have the ability to make the field required, totaled in reports, and the define the display order.

Example #1 - Capture Industry Specific Data for Your Deals

Manufacturing Company
Let's say you are a manufacturing company, and you need to keep track of product units as well as the customer's product interest.

You can simply add new fields to your deals page, called "Product Units" and "Product Interest".

Real Estate Brokerage
If you are a real estate firm and need to keep track of deals for property types, key buying features and buyer's price ranges, you could add those fields onto the deals page.

Example #2 - Capture More Sales $ Details

Add some additional sales and revenue details to your deal:

- Total Potential $ of the Account/Relationship

- Forecast $ - We will automatically calculate this for you based on probability x your $ amount field.

- Services $ - Break down your deals according to product and service $

Example #3 - Sales Process and Methodology

If you follow a very specific or structured sales methodology, you can add important deal criteria to the deals page to manage your sales team and deals:

In this example, you can track and report on:

Overall position summary on the deal
Red Flags
Specific Buyers that may or may not be identified on the deal
Next Actions

How does this feature work with deal tags?

There are several important changes related to deal tags.

1. Deal tags currently listed at the bottom of the deals page, will moved into the Deal Details section. You will no longer need to scroll to the bottom of the page, which should facilitate deal entry.

2. You will be able to make a deal tag required entry if you so choose.

3. You could also rename your deal tags to a more meaningful name. For example, if you are using deal tags for labeling deals with products and regions, you could easily create 2 new fields and name them Products, and Regions (instead of deal tags).

4. The deal tags report will be in a new location. (more on this in the next blog post).

More information on the new feature coming in the next preview.