Think Pipeline - PipelineDeals CRM

Leads Management is Launched!

The Team at PipelineDeals has been working hard to provide you with the best simple CRM tool on the market. We are excited to announce the launch of our new Leads Management Module. We also have some exciting enhancements planned in the upcoming weeks and months.

Our new Leads Tab provides some simple and powerful features to better manage your unqualified business prospects. Our goal was to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of working new business relationships.

Read about the new features here in the preview blog posts:

1. Preview #1 - New Leads Management

2. Preview #2 - Measuring ROI on Leads

3. Preview #3 - Importing

Let us know what you think. We already made some improvements based on initial feedback from customers.

Importing Leads

Today, we are previewing some important new importing capabilities we will have with our new leads management module.

HOW IT WORKS

The new leads importing tool includes some powerful features. More specifically, you will be able to:

1. Import leads in any CSV formatted file in any order, with any number of fields
2. Assign Leads to your team members (either to a specific member or round robin) during the import process
3. Add a lead source to the leads
4. Assign one or more tags to your leads on the fly
5. Send email notifications during assignment
6. Map multiple notes and/or tags from your file to PipelineDeals fields
7. Map your data to custom fields

Of course, you can also re-assign, mass tag, archive and delete your leads using the new leads worklist as well at a later point in time.

How is it different than the current importing process?
Essentially, the current bulk lead importing process will be replaced with this more flexible importing tool. The current contacts importing process will stay in place. That is, you will be able to import contacts in pre-defined formats such as vcards, Microsoft Outlook, Highrise or Salesforce.com.

It is important to note that any contacts imported will not be treated as leads and will not show on your leads worklist. You can always turn any contact into a lead by adding a lead source.

WHERE DO LEADS GO?
After the import, you will then be able to begin working your leads in the new leads worklist.

WILL I NEED TO ALWAYS MAP FIELDS?
No. Our importer is smart enough to recognize a prior format and will just use the rules and mapping that you defined from an earlier import. For example, if you purchased leads from a specific vendor which has a pre-set field and file format, you will only need to map those fields once.

Measuring ROI on Leads

Today, we are previewing an additional feature of our new leads management module: leads cost tracking and lead source return on investment (ROI). These features are designed to help you manage and track your marketing programs that will generate the highest return on your marketing dollars.

Managing your leads efficiently and in a cost effective way is critical to the pursuit of closing more deals in your sales pipeline.

HOW DOES IT WORK?
Leads ROI tracking is very simple and easy to use. Here is a quick overview of how to starting tracking your lead costs:

1. Create lead sources (using the admin tool)
2. Assign lead source costs (see below)
3. Create some leads using the Import Leads feature or add leads manually and assign a lead source
4. Create a deal from the lead
5. Close the deal

Your leads will now be associated with the deal revenue, and the costs. Your ROI is calculated and displayed in a report, by dividing your revenue by costs.

ASSIGNING LEADS COSTS
PipelineDeals already supports the ability to assign a lead source and track its associated revenue. We are enhancing that capability with the ability to assign costs to your lead sources.

To assign costs to your lead sources, simply have your administrator add the costs using the admin tool.

FLAT FEE COSTS
You can assign a simple flat fee to your lead source. Use flat fee costs when you are spending a fixed amount of dollars on a marketing or lead generation program. A good example, would be a trade-show, where you might spend several hundred to several thousands of dollars. This is a one-time cost which would be spread over all of the leads generated from the trade-show.

PER LEAD COSTS
You can also assign per lead costs. Use per lead costs when you are purchasing leads from an outside vendor, or maybe getting leads from search engines such as Google, paying on pay-per-click basis.

LEADS ROI REPORT

The leads ROI report displays your lead sources, number of leads for each source, associated revenue, costs, costs per lead, and return on investment (ROI %).

NEW LEADS GRAPHS

Number of Closed Leads By Lead Source

This graph displays your closed leads over for a specified period. You can change the period to review your closed leads for this month, the last 3 or 6 months, and year to date.

Revenue, Costs and Profit By Lead Source

This graph shows you the revenue, costs, and profit in a nice 3D bar chart associated with a specific lead source. You can change the period to review your revenue, costs and profit for the last 3 or 6 months, and year to date.

This feature will be launching soon.

Preview #1: New Leads Management

Today, we are previewing our new Leads Management module for PipelineDeals. Leads management and leads tracking are critical functions for any sales or marketing professional, and are essential components in our simple CRM solution.

Our Current Leads Management Solution
Our current leads management solution consists of a simple leads report, the ability to assign a lead to another team member, and the ability to track lead sources and revenue associated with leads. While adequate for some businesses, many of our customers found some gaps in our solution. Our new leads management solution will address these gaps.

We thank our customers for their numerous recommendations which were essential in helping craft our leads solution.

A New Leads Tab
Leads management is so important to the sales function and managing your sales pipeline that we decided to add an additional tab to enable our customers to focus on these new business development activities.

It may be helpful to know how we differentiate leads from deals in our system: the leads module is used to manage and track your unqualified sales prospects, the deals page is used to track qualified sales prospects. Leads are essentially contacts that have an associated lead source.

How does it work?
The new leads tab provides some simple and powerful features to manage your leads. Let me highlight a few features:

Leads Worklists
A leads worklist is just a list of leads that you are working on - calling, emailing, documenting call notes, or just plain getting organized. We will default this to all of your leads that have been assigned to you or that have been imported into the system.

Smart Worklists
We also created some smart worklists to improve your productivity and focus on working the leads.

Today's Leads
Don't know where to begin your day? We help you get your leads organized with the "Today's Leads" smart list. This list is your leads that have activities due today. For example, if you have setup several to-dos and events such as phone calls, meetings or follow-ups, these leads will be highlighted in this list for you. And you can specifically focus on making your calls, sending your emails, and documenting notes for your leads.

Untouched vs Touched Leads
Many of our customers are managing hundreds or even thousands of leads. Of course, this gets overwhelming and unwieldy - who did I call? when did I last touch this lead? We designed two smart lists for you to help manage this problem. Untouched leads is a list of leads where you have no outstanding to-dos, events or notes. Touched leads are those leads where you have started some activity.

Build Your Own Worklists
We have also created a new feature that allows you to build your own smart worklist. For example, let's say you wanted to focus your calls this week on leads in a specific region or geography. You could build a leads worklist based on area code or region (assuming you tagged your leads with region). You can use this worklist for an upcoming road trip to a specific city.

In another example, you could create a leads worklist to focus your calls on a specific product or service line. Just simply use the tags field to tag your contacts with the product or service line.

Improved Leads Workflow
Our goals with our new leads management solution was to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of working new business relationships and your sales prospects. More specifically, we wanted to reduce the number of clicks to find your leads, document notes and create follow-up activities and events.

You can see below a sample of the new leads worklist screen. Note, all pertinent lead information is at your fingertips: Company Name, Contact and Phone Number. In addition, you are 1 click away from all existing notes and events, as well as creating new todos and events for your leads.

So, basically you will never have to leave your leads worklist when focusing on making a large amount of calls, or follow-up communications with your leads.

Lead Qualified?
Once your lead has been qualified, we have made it simple to create a deal from the lead. Just select the contacts at the company and click Create Deal. A new deal will be created for you with all of the relevant contacts already associated to the deal.

Improved Leads Maintenance
In addition to the above features, we have enhanced and simplified the ability to manage leads in bulk. You will be able to easily do the following actions with one, or many of your leads:

Leads Re-assignment
You will be able to quickly re-assign leads to other team members using the leads re-assign function.

Leads Tagging
You will be able to tag your leads more efficiently using the Tag Leads feature. Again, you will be able to tag one or more of your leads with keywords for product, service, region, or whatever you like.

Leads Archiving
Leads archiving will allow you to move your leads out of your primary workspace and onto a special worklist for Archived leads.

Leads Deleting
Have you ever purchased a whole bunch of leads that didn't go anywhere? Now we will provide an easy way to mass delete those bogus leads.

Next Preview - Leads ROI Reporting
In our next preview, we will cover how PipelineDeals can help you better manage your marketing costs and see which leads are turning into real sales dollars.

Customize: Lead Sources

Lead Sources will be increasing in importance within PipelineDeals. Although we have talked about Lead Sources before in an earlier post, we thought it was best to do a separate post as part of our "Customize" series just on Lead Sources. Especially given the upcoming Leads 2.0 Release in the coming weeks.


What is a Lead?

A lead is a potential future customer and knowing where your leads come from is paramount to knowing the essence of your business. Leads can come from a myriad of different places which we call a lead source. Other names used for lead include prospect, potential, or candidate. They are all one in the same.  Leads and their sources are truly the top of the sales funnel and usually consist of some basic contact information including the name and/or company along with either a telephone number or an email address. Leads are what ultimately turn into Deals.

What is a Lead Source?

A Lead Source is any person, company or resource through which your company obtains a lead. Lead Sources can be any number of things - arguably the more the better. PipelineDeals will help you understand what sources are driving good business and soon we will help you track the ROI (Return on Investment) of your lead sources - see the previous post down below "Know What Works: Managing Leads".

Lead Sources come in all shapes and sizes. As you can see above, here are some sample lead sources from our demo application. Many businesses across industries acquire leads from trade shows or industry conferences. Leads also come into businesses through existing sources like a Call Center or via our most popular lead source here at PipelineDeals: Referrals.  Every business is unique and you can keep track of your own list of lead sources in the Admin side of PipelineDeals under "Manage Lead Sources".

Take the long term view and make sure to utilize the Lead Source feature. As time goes on you will get a better handle on what leads and lead sources are truly driving your business. Of course, if you want to talk about the best lead sources for you in your business, give us a call and we will be glad to help.

Know What Works: Managing Leads

The PipelineDeals Team has been busy crafting some major improvements around Lead Management. Keep an eye out for upcoming posts this week and next week previewing the upcoming release. Leads are obviously a critical part of the sales process - actually the very top of the sales funnel. Without good organization and execution around lead prospecting, vetting and qualification - there would never be any deals to manage. No deals equals no new business. In fact, you will see a new Leads tab as part of the upcoming release. The new tab demonstrates how important we have found leads to be based on our Client feedback.

As we all know leads cost money - whether you acquire leads at a Trade Show, from current Clients or buy them from a lead provider. It is important, especially in long sales cycle businesses, to know what works. Did that trade show last year in Las Vegas pay for itself in business? Should I go back to the same show this year or should I spend that money on a direct mail campaign? Businesses around the world ask the same questions every year. Well, those questions will end here and now with the PipelineDeals Leads 2.0 Release coming in the next couple weeks.

Start pulling together costs for any lead sources you have in PipelineDeals. As part of this upcoming release, PipelineDeals users will be able to establish a Return on Investment (ROI) for each lead source in the application. Lead costs will be calculated in one of two ways - it is up to you. Either you can assign a cost to a lead on an individual basis - as a cost per lead (CPL). Alternatively you can have us do the math for you and you can enter one lump sum per lead source which we will divide by the number of leads from that same source.

We plan to help you solve the mystery of knowing where to spend your marketing and lead generation dollars. Of course, the data out is only as good as the data in, so take the time now to begin defining your lead costs so you can find the ROI of your lead sources sooner rather than later.

Customize: Note Categories

Everyone loves taking notes. Notes are a mechanism that provides the ability to keep a running conversation associated with a Deal or a Contact. Notes are also a sign of progress or that someone touched a deal or contact. PipelineDeals uses notes for you to add specific details about a Deal or a Contact as part of your sales tracking process. Every note in PipelineDeals also has the ability to associate a Note Category. The same Note Cateogies can be associated with Deals, Contacts and/or Leads.

Note Categories are actually pretty powerful and allow for you to track activity across your entire sales team. Note Categories are customizable and can be administrated in the back end to ensure everyone is using the same note categories. Most note categories are verbs, or work words. To set up or modify note categories click the "Admin" link in the upper right hand corner on any page of the application. Then click on "Manage Not Categories" on the menu. You can then add, delete or edit any note category. You can see is a screen capture of the note categories we use here at PipelineDeals. Along with Deal Stages, we have seen customers use Note Categories used to track customer conversations as Sales Stages as checkpoint within each Deal Stage.

What is helpful is that within the Notes Report a Manager or Executive can run a report and filter on Note Category. As part of this report you can also filter on Deal, Contact/Lead Name, Owner and Created Date. This is effectively an customizable activity report that can provide insight to who on the sales team has done what along four primary slices of time: This Week, Last Week, This Month, Last Month. The Notes Report provides a simple and quick way to see progress in your sales process. Need to brainstorm on how best to use note categories? Feel free to give us a call today.

Customize: Deal Stages

Deals generally mature in stages. A good sales process has a defined progression of stages all aimed at one objective: closing the deal. Deal stages come in all sorts of different flavors, however, we find that all companies should start out with a basic set of stages that matter to them. After consulting with hundreds of companies about how best to think about their own sales process one piece of advice comes to mind: Don't get overwhelmed by the nuances of your process - start with something basic and refine it over time.

A simple sales tool like PipelineDeals allows you to customize your deal stages. PipelineDeals allows for customization in the Admin menu of the application under "Customize Sales Process". Once there you can create as many (or as few) deal stages as needed. Here is a screen snippet of one example of deal stages we use at PipelineDeals as shown in the customize portion of the application:

Deal stages without meaning don't do anybody any good. As with most things, keeping it simple and relevant is the key. Use words everyone in your organization can understand. Not only does this help with keeping the boss up to speed, but simple, straightforward deal stages also make talking to accounting or training new people much easier.

You Grow, We Grow

You know you are onto something when the service you provide helps your customer's succeed. This evening, as we were talking about PipelineDeals and the sales teams we serve, one of our team members made a great point. Follow this simple chain of events:

1. You have a business selling a product/service.
2. You establish a sales process to better sell your offering.
3. You decide to employ the services of PipelineDeals to manage your sales efforts.
4. You are now able to sell more effectively.
5. Your business grows.
6. You have to hire more sales people.
7. You add more seats to PipelineDeals.
8. Repeat steps 5 through 8.

Of course it is naive to think that effective management of your sales process is the lone critical success factor of your business. Every business has its own circumstances and key things that ultimately dictate its own success or demise. As we are running our business, we try and distill the business down to those elements that are truly vital - truly elemental. Anyone would be hard pressed to say that Sales in not a key element of every business.

We like to think that if we help you succeed, we become more indispensable to your business and the cycle continues. It is nice to see those who start out with a Free or 30-day Test Account upgrade to a Premium Account with a high frequency. Premium Accounts with a few seats more often than not end up adding seats regularly. We have no choice but to believe that the chain of events outlined above is manifested in the purchasing behavior we are witnessing at PipelineDeals.

How this post could help your business: It is a common notion that business success is most likely achieved when motivations (and economics) are aligned. As you evaluate your business take a look at how best to position your company to be instrumental to your customer's success. You can achieve business success once you truly provide a value to your customers, establish sustainable expense/revenue picture and execute on your business. At a minimum do those three things and you are well on your way to succeeding in business.

Go Human - A True Competitive Advantage

We often get asked by various people: "What makes you different?"

Differentiation is obviously important and being able to stand out from the crowd is a matter of life and death for businesses today. As PipelineDeals grows and the number of customers multiply, we have the good "problem" of deciding how best to meet our customer's needs.  For starters we endeavor to put out a superior product that constantly evolves and improves. Second, we provide timely and relevant self-help. Lastly, and something that is a core tenet of ours, is to provide superior service from awesome people.

PipelineDeals differentiates itself with an arguably pedestrian and simple strategy: Go Human. Yes, we are technologists and enjoy working with technology, however our belief is that too many software and technology companies view technology as the cure all. The famous Abraham Maslow Golden Hammer concept comes to mind: "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

Technology is increasingly seen as that Golden Hammer. Google is a perfect example of this problem - ever see a phone number for GMail support? No way. Google Applications support? Nope. Google Checkout support? Uh, no. There is an implied and unspoken technology-driven snobbery (maybe even elitism) that tells customers: If you can't figure it out you must be stupid and we don't value you. Software can be imitated, people and the relationships they build cannot. As PipelineDeals competes among behemoths like Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle, we can provide a level of service that they can't even touch and we plan to keep it that way. Try us - give us a call, Skype or if you happen to be in the Philadelphia area, stop by. You will find that we are real people who really care about your experience using our product.

Lastly, we recommend that you try going human more in your own business. As you think about ways to differentiate and create competitive advantages for your business think about how you can increase the human factor. Customers are tired of hold times and seemingly endless voice activated response phone systems. The customer "wow" factor never ceases to amaze me when we answer the phone with a live human. Sounds intuitive and simple but it can be easier said than done. Admittedly we want to be able to do this 24x7 for our customers around the world and we have to improve. But for now, give us a call during working hours Eastern Standard Time and we will be happy to provide you with human service. If we don't pick up, leave us a message and a human will call you right back.

Photo Credit: Luc Viatour