What I Like About Pipeline Deals CRM for Small Businesses

I’ve been a fan of Pipeline Deals CRM since I first heard about, around four years ago. The only thing I real­ly did not care for with Pipeline was the lack of Mobile inte­gra­tion. The end of April of 2013, Pipeline Deals released their first native App for the iPhone. It is ver­sion one and has a few bugs to work out, but that was a very help­ful upgrade and fea­ture for iPhone users. In this post I want to explain a cou­ple of rea­sons why I like Pipeline Deals and why you should con­sid­er it for your small or medi­um size busi­ness.

1. Good inte­gra­tion with Google Apps: Those who are using Google Apps will like most of the fea­tures Pipeline has to offer. You don’t have to leave your email to type impor­tant infor­ma­tion about a client or prospect. You can do all of this with­in the Pipeline Google Gad­get. This is a time saver and works beau­ti­ful­ly. All notes, task, events, emails, etc can go right into Pipeline Deals direct­ly from your Gmail inter­face. The two way cal­en­dar fea­ture from Pipeline and Google Cal­en­dar also work well. The only thing that is still a lit­tle sketchy is the Google Con­tacts fea­ture. It works, but I’ve found a lot of dupli­cates with mul­ti­ple users. 
2. Goals: This is one of the only CRMs on the mar­ket that has a Goals sec­tion and that is easy to use. You can have indi­vid­ual sales and team goals. So if you want to know where your team is at for the week, month or year, Pipeline Deals makes it very easy to find out! This real­ly is a valu­able tool for those who have 2 plus sales people.
3. Reports: The report­ing in Pipeline Deals still has room for improve­ment. For now, you typ­i­cal­ly do what you need right with­in the pro­gram. They also give you the oppor­tu­ni­ty to Export reports into Excel and do more advanced report­ing. I have a few clients who’ve built cus­tom Excel spread­sheets and then export the Pipeline reports into Excel. It works well, and they have all the report­ing data they need. I pri­mar­i­ly use the reports to look at the mar­ket­ing. I like to see the total leads from each source, dol­lar amount won, lost etc. So it helps me know what mar­ket­ing pro­grams are work­ing more than others.
4. Con­tact Man­age­ment: Keep­ing track of con­tacts with­in Pipeline is pret­ty sim­ple once you get used to the inter­face and spend a lit­tle time pok­ing around in the pro­gram. I know quite a few peo­ple who are NOT tech savvy at all who can move through Pipeline Deals with ease. Cus­tomiz­ing Pipeline Deals to take down new lead infor­ma­tion, sched­ule, fol­low up, all of the key areas involved in the sales process can be done with­in this CRM. The only thing that is lack­ing, and this is true for most CRMs, is advanced fea­tures for post sale man­age­ment. Some of the post sale can be done now, but takes a lit­tle more effort and customization.
5. Sup­port: Pipeline Deals prob­a­bly has the best cus­tomer ser­vice sup­port team I’ve seen. You can email, chat or call them and they are there to help. This is a free fea­ture (with­in rea­son). If you call them every­day and spend 30+ mins, they might ask you to lim­it your tech sup­port! Actu­al­ly, you can pay for cus­tom work from them too. So if you want them to help cus­tom Pipeline for your oper­a­tion, they can do this for a small fee, which is worth it.

Pipeline Deals I believe is around to stay. They are a lit­tle slow at pro­vid­ing updates to their pro­gram, but the updates are almost always bug free and not dras­tic changes. They’ve built a sol­id CRM. This is what I like most about Pipeline. You can rely on their com­pa­ny to pro­vide you with a qual­i­ty and sim­ple CRM. My guess is their debt is very low if they have any debt at all. So their growth will be slow and steady. They have a loy­al cus­tomer base of hap­py users. They have plans to con­tin­ue to devel­op their mobile plat­form, which still is lack­ing. This is not the end of the world now that many of us can work remote­ly with a lap­top these days.  So there you have it. I’ve only scratched the sur­face on the things I like about Pipeline Deals. I could do a whole webi­nar on all the key fea­tures! Pipeline Deals sup­port offers ongo­ing and free webi­na­rs to learn how to uti­lize Pipeline for your busi­ness. Give it a try and let me know what you think. The cost is more than rea­son­able for what you get. $25 per users/​per month.