I have been a fan of
Pipeline Deals CRM for quite a few years now. It is one of the simplest and easiest ways to use CRMs for small businesses, especially contractors. The majority of the painting clients I work with are using Pipeline Deals. It does not have all the features of some of the more complex programs out there such as: Salesforce, Zoho, Base, to name a few. I pretty much think that most CRMs on the market have a place. There is room for a lot of competition. So when I write about Pipeline, it does not mean it is the best
CRM for a contractor. It really depends on a number of factors and what the company really wants a
CRM to do!
QuickBooks Online
Now, we have some exciting news as we wrap up November
2015 about
Pipeline Deals. They made a new integration that really does save users some extra time and avoids double entry! Double entry tends to be common amongst many CRMs that do not link to your other favorite apps, like Quickbooks. The workaround has been programs like
Zapier. Zapier works just fine with hundreds of apps, but I love it when the there is a real integration between two apps. This is the case with Pipeline when they recently integrated their
CRM with Quickbooks Online. Instead of having to let your bookkeeper know you have a new job that was sold, once a job is marked as won, it will send the information to Quickbooks Online automatically! No more need to double entry your customer information!
Email Inside of Pipeline
Another big release from Pipeline this fall was sending and receiving emails directly within Pipeline. This again, avoids the need to jump back and forth between your email platform. This update has been rolling out to users and is still being updated (getting better). I was an early test pilot of the email system. It is starting out very basic, yet it works well. I believe they will be adding the ability to send emails within a deal or contract soon.
Task Automation
This is not a new update as of this fall, but I did not get notified by Pipeline about it. I had to contact them asking for this feature, and they showed me that it was already live! The interface and the use is pretty basic, so I hope they will make it easier for users. However, the task automation does work. You can create a number of different next steps automatically. An example, if you move a deal to the state
“sent estimate,” you can have a task created automatically that gives you the next steps in the sales cycle:
call in 2 days if no word.
Sums it Up
The updates I have seen Pipeline create this year are pretty major for this
CRM company. They tend to have a very quality working product that just works; their updates have always been minor and slow with a big one here and there. By adding email integration, Quickbooks Online and task automation this year, makes their product that much better in the
CRM market for service companies. If you are looking for a
CRM for your company and do not want a lot of bells and whistles, many of my clients have been quite happy with Pipeline. In the
4+ years many of them have been using it, I do not see them jumping ship to hunt for something bigger or better. Give it a spin with a
2 week free trial. After that, depending on what you’d like to have it do, it is $
24 or $
48 a month per user. These are decent prices for this type of
CRM. You can find some for less and others for quite a bit more. Most of my clients are at the $
24 a month level.
Side Note: Oh, forgot one last thing that happened with Pipeline this year. They have some of the easiest to use reporting tools already in Pipeline. However, they created an integration for Microsoft Excel and Google Sheet users. So you can map a report to a custom spreadsheet. This is a pretty nifty and handy tool for working on analytics of your sales and marketing.