Pipeline Deals CRM

After over three years of test dri­ving dozens of Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) pro­grams, I’ve decid­ed to endorse my two favorites: Pipeline Deals and Base CRM (affil­i­ate link). This week’s blog will be focus­ing on Pipeline Deals: the Pros & Cons of this cloud CRM. As a reminder, both Base and Pipeline Deals are very effec­tive for man­ag­ing your mar­ket­ing, sales & cus­tomer base. If you want to have good track­ing in your busi­ness, you need to set­tle upon a good CRM pro­gram. If you are not want­i­ng too many fea­tures to over­whelm you, Pipeline or Base will do the trick.

Pipeline Deals

PROS

• Very sim­ple but good inter­face and CRM fea­tures. This is not a com­pli­cat­ed CRM. The design and fea­tures have improved over the years, and it is very easy for users to fig­ure out and start using in very lit­tle time. Most of my clients have set­tled upon Pipeline Deals. I believe it is because of the price point ($24 a month per user) and the ease of use. The CRM fea­tures are there: Con­tacts, Cal­en­dar, Deals (sales track­ing), Report­ing for Sales & Mar­ket­ing, Doc­u­ment and Call/​Email Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Storage.
• Inte­grates with Mailchimp: With a few clicks of a but­ton, a user can quick­ly add new con­tacts to their Mailchimp email mar­ket­ing list(s). Mailchimp will not allow dupli­cates, so even if you acci­den­tal­ly add some­one twice, it will remove it.
• Works Well with Google: More and more busi­ness­es are using Google Apps for email, cal­en­dar and oth­er busi­ness com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Pipeline has cre­at­ed a beau­ti­ful two-way sync with their cal­en­dar and Google Cal­en­dar. It is one of the only pro­grams that has such a slick and easy two-way sync. Many oth­ers on the mar­ket are bug­gy or only a one-way sync. They offer a two-way Google Con­tact sync as well. That works, but I’ve seen a lot of dupli­cates with this fea­ture. There­fore, I encour­age users to dis­able the con­tact shar­ing. Final­ly, Pipeline has what is called a Google Gad­get. This installs a scaled down CRM of Pipeline in each email you receive in Google’s Gmail. A user can add spe­cif­ic emails to a con­tac­t’s pro­file, BCC impor­tant emails, add notes, cre­ate events, task and more all with­in Gmail. This is a must have fea­ture, sav­ing you time hav­ing to login to your CRM to make quick changes and updates. 
• Goals Tab: One of the only CRM pro­grams on the mar­ket that has this key fea­ture. If you have more than 1 sales­per­son work­ing for you, you’ll love the Goals Tab on Pipeline Deals. You can set indi­vid­ual and team sales goals: month­ly and annu­al goals. It works very well. Every time a sales­per­son changes a deal to won or lost, it updates the goal tab.
• Brand­ing & Cus­tom Fields: A pret­ty com­mon fea­ture in most CRMs, you can install your com­pa­ny logo with­in Pipeline Deals & change the col­ors the tabs, cus­tom fields and but­tons. The cus­tom field area is also very easy to use and a key fea­ture. You can set cus­tom fields for DEALS or CON­TACTS. Some of my clients use it for their pre-qual­i­fi­ca­tion process: Size of Home, Esti­ma­tor’s Name, Refer­ral Source, and much more. You can have mul­ti­ple choice options, drop­down menus, long and short text and more. Very use­ful feature!
• Cus­tom Reports: Want to know how many leads from the Inter­net you had the past 7 days? Pipeline Deals can make a cus­tom report called ​“Inter­net Leads The Past 7 Days” and show you the details. Pipeline’s report­ing fea­tures are very cus­tom to your lik­ing and have many vari­ables and cri­te­ria. If you are an ana­lyt­ic junkie, you can down­load those reports into an Excel spread­sheet and con­tin­ue your track­ing further.
• Price: One low price of $15 per user per month. It is one of the least expen­sive CRMs on the mar­ket with more than enough fea­tures for small businesses.
• Sup­port: Bot­tom line…their sup­port is the best! I know all the guys over at Pipeline Deals. They are all awesome!