What makes a CRM app the best? It can have the most robust features, but fail in user engagement. It may be simple enough to use, but devoid of sophisticated capabilities. In fact, it may have both aspects, but its support may be lacking. This has been our experience after reviewing over seventy CRM apps: they’re great in one aspect, only to fail in another.
However, we also reviewed a handful of CRM solutions that have all these aspects that make them truly earn their place amont top CRMs. After a thorough review of all these solutions, we found PipelineDeals to be the best software in its category and it exhibits all the top attributes of a great CRM software. We were more than confident about PipelineDeals quality and reliability when we decided to distinguish it with our Best CRM Award for 2015. The service also shines in other aspects and won awards for Most Customizable Software, Useful Free Trial, and Great User Experience.
In this article, we’ll discuss the reasons for the awards by highlighting the software’s winning features, from sales acceleration to lead nurturing and email campaigns, and more. You can also try out the service on your own with a great free trial plan that lets you test all the key features offered by the software. You can easily sign up for PipelineDeals free trial here.
Here’s what you’ll find in our review:
The highlights of PipelineDeals
What we like most about the service
What customers say about it
Awards won by PipelineDeals
Interview with PipelineDeals’ CEO
What are the highlights of PipelineDeals?
Simple UI but sophisticated capabilities
Deep customization extends your CRM’s reach
Email and app integration keeps data synchronized and optimized
Deal management fosters collaboration and shared knowledge
Sales acceleration tools cut the sales cycle and increase conversion rate
Lead management helps to nurture leads across a clear conversion path
You can achieve goals by breaking targets into milestones and incite leaderboard competition
Shared pipeline and list views help the team to focus on insights, not just data
What We Like the Most about PipelineDeals
1. You fast tracks the sales cycle
One of the bottlenecks in a sales cycle is not knowing quick enough who is doing what. This results in missing opportunities or wasting time following the wrong lead. We noted that two PipelineDeals modules can address this problem: sales acceleration and deal management.
Launching an email campaign is done in a few steps: use CRM filters to sort recipients, name the email campaign, compose message or upload a template, use trackable links, then send or schedule it later. With PipelineDeals we were able to track opened emails, clicks, and downloads in a campaign, which were registered as activities in the software. This sped up our follow throughs and allowed us to move qualified leads faster.
Further on, we could keep a close tab on priority activities through the deals management, which gave us the big picture where each lead was heading. This has got to be one of PipelineDeals’ winning features. You can use default deal stages with a clear conversion path or customize the sales process by adding your unique workflows including customizing the activity categories and deal templates. When looking for the best CRM software, we always advise buyers to get the one that match their processes.
Likewise, we really liked seeing the next-step tasks in our dashboard every time we logged in, so we could work on priorities at once. For the sales manager, keeping a real-time log of the sales team’s activities has never been easier and more accurate.
2. You nurture leads, not just manage them
The real key to increasing your conversion rate is to nurture leads, not just collect them. But this can be hard when you’re swamped with contacts coming from different sources and with different roles. We appreciated one of the ways PipelineDeals offers to solve this problem: organizing your lists–yes, you’ll need more than one list to effectively nurture leads–in a way that matches various scenarios.
We had plenty of column types (25 to be exact) to organize various lists of companies, deals, people, and agendas. In fact, organizing our lists in a way that matched our simulated workflows or processes not only kept our house spanking clean, but we could find opportunities or avert a loss based on different perspectives, such as:
Who our valued or promising clients are (companies)
Critical stages in the sales pipeline (deals)
Agent activities (people)
Tasks that needed our urgent attention (agenda)
As you launch one email campaigns after another, your lists will be ramped up with more insights–for example, contacts who clicked a link or downloaded your offer–further fine tuning the leads. In one campaign, we were surprised to get clicks from low priority leads, which threw a monkey wrench into our high quality lead funnel. But it was easy to create another list for this set and nurture these leads with a campaign independent of high-level leads. This is one way PipelineDeals’ flexible contact management becomes indispensable in lead nurturing.
The contact and lead management module also lets you:
Put all business relationships in one place
Track leads that are converting best
Delegate leads while avoiding duplicating contacts
Customize lead status schema midway to adjust to sudden opportunities
We also found uploading contacts easy with the drag-and-drop tool (Excel, CSV, vCard). You also get to add notes or review the list before submitting it to the cloud.
3. You set and track sales targets with ease
Sales are most effective when goals are clear and team competition is incited. PipelineDeals has six goal-centric tools that use leaderboard scoring to prop up teams to do their best. The tools are one of the simplest mechanisms we’ve seen around; it’s so straightforward that it may just be more effective.
Instead of an end-all target, you set goals across milestones in your sales funnel. For instance, you can set goals based on revenues, number of closed deals, forwarded deals, completed tasks, and additional number of tasks or new leads. This is useful to break an intimidating goal into bite-size sub-goals or turn a vague goal into concrete small steps.
Furthermore, you can customize the dashboard to reflect these goals and receive real-time updates to monitor the team’s progress. PipelineDeals also integrates with Excel and Google Sheets to further customize the goals.
4. Sales team is focused on important data
The sales dashboard on the homepage gave us a quick glance on our sales performance status. We also got to see daily pipeline activities delivered in the dashboard inbox, such as, how much revenues we earned or deals closed yesterday and by whom. This daily real-time updates are great for the manager who wants to stay on top of his team’s daily pipeline achievements (or lack thereof) to keep a close tab on his weekly and monthly targets. Further, visually appealing 3D charts in the dashboard made it even easier for us to track our metrics. The CRM software has seven charts that show key pipeline metrics.
The pipeline can also be customized and shared with your team. This makes your sales meetings more focused with a two-way perspective: the manager’s and agents’. Everybody is looking at the same critical data in the graph, while they chip in information for the reasons behind the data. In a simulated scenario, our manager was able to focus the discussion on why the number of new contacts is low, when team members started sharing various obstacles to securing new leads. The meeting was then focused on devising new ways to get more contacts. There’s a high degree of analytics to make sales meetings productive and without guesswork.
You can also share list views, deals and activities, and sales documents with the team to optimize data for opportunities or resolutions. One of the agents can have a difficult client pain point that has been resolved in another case by another agent. A promising lead may be better suited for another agent, who happens to know the prospect. In short, one agent can pass a lead to another to move the deal. These are a few critical scenarios that you can easily solve with PipelineDeals.
5. Expand your CRM’s potential
Integration is important in a CRM software because no single solution can handle all business processes efficiently. In fact, it’s one of the 5 CRM online software questions to ask before buying a plan. Moreover, the best CRM should work well with apps that you’re already using efficiently.
When reviewing software, we always qualify integration not as a numbers game; rather, we highlight the quality of integration based on practical app usage. That’s why we rated PipelineDeals high in integration because it works smoothly with Google For Work and Outlook to sync calendars, contacts, and emails. You can keep contact and event details updated whether in PipelineDeals or your email client, giving you more flexibility and options.
Similarly, we found that PipelineDeals integrates well with the more important productivity and marketing apps, such as, MailChimp, Excel, Google Apps, LinkedIn, and, to fully extend integration, with Zapier and its host of 500+ business apps. You can also develop custom integration with the software’s API.
Besides the top reasons why we like PipelineDeals, these two features add to the winning performance of the CRM software:
Optimized mobile access
You get to use free Android or iOS apps to give you that native feel. We installed the app on iPhone, and it allowed us to do the following on the fly:
View sales pipeline
View and update deals
Access and add contacts
Track activities
Manage agenda
All changes we made on the iPhone synced at once to our web account. This made it easier to collaborate with our sales team, while providing us with real-time information while in the field.
If you hate installing apps, you can log in using a mobile device and you’re automatically directed to an optimized mobile site. Again, all records are synced so you’re always using the latest data.
Account customization
Aside from creating your own deal stages, you can customize PipelineDeals even further. You can control user access and roles to share data to increase collaboration, while sealing off confidential data. You can also define custom fields and activity categories. You have 25 custom fields to play with to capture data that is meaningful to your business process. Likewise, you can add your logo–replace the PipelineDeals icon–and corporate colors to brand the software.
What customers say about PipelineDeals
A quick look at user reviews of the software across the web revealed that customers are happy about three major aspects: ease of use, customer support, and flexibility.
A media manager, Jason Svenson likes the simplicity of the dashboard. “It’s a technology product but technology doesn’t get in the way,” he said, reflecting the sentiments of many non-technical PipelineDeals users from non-profits to media companies. Jason also mentioned he just needed a few days to get the hang of the mobile version. “It’s also accessible on my iPhone and tablet. I’m always out so I use the mobile apps a lot.”
Likewise, customers cited PipelineDeals for its tech support. “It was simple to set up, plus you get great phone support. This is useful for new users like me,” said Greg M., a benefits manager. Also, a certain Howard Francis loved that customer reps are “real Americans talking to you.” To discerning customers, this signals that vendor support is well funded, thus, reliable, noting that most call centers today are outsourced in other countries to cut costs.
Finally, as expected, many users like the flexibility of PipelineDeals’ customization and integration capabilities. “It’s got a high degree of custom fields to design your workflow,” said Marge Bellone, one of PipelineDeals’ customers. “Our CRM isn’t confined to sales. We use the software to organize events, too. A canned solution simply won’t work in our case.”
Awards and Quality Certificates won by PipelineDeals
Best CRM Award for 2015
After our extensive review of PipelineDeals we found it to be the best product among more than 70 CRM apps we tested. It is a must-have CRM solution especially for small and medium businesses. PipelineDeals merited the top category award for combining UI simplicity with sophisticated capabilities including powerful customizations and integrations. We are confident to recommend the software to clients who look for the best CRM software coupled with excellent customer support and vendor credibility.
Most Customizable Software Award
We believe that one of PipelineDeals’ killer features are its extensive customization capabilities across various CRM aspects. You enjoy great flexibility in matching the software with your workflows, including deal stages, category types for contacts, CRM metrics, and goal targets. The award illustrates that the software features a wide range of customization options; hence, smooth application in diverse scenarios that match individual, corporate, or industry needs.
Useful Free Trial Certificate
This certificate is granted to products that offer a versatile and useful free trial to their customers. We evaluated the quality of options included in a free trial, its limitations and the ability to judge the software itself based on the free trial contents. Upon signup, you get the full functions of PipelineDeals, plus a plethora of tips and tutorials to help you get started. We find it innovative that the tutorials, in fact, are integrated within the software’s sections to help orient you with the features, not in a standalone manual-like window. If you’d like to try out their services on your own you can easily get PipelineDeals free trial here.
Great User Experience Certificate
This certificate is granted to products that offer especially good user experience. We evaluate how easy it is to start using the product and how well-designed its interface and features are to facilitate the work process. Because PipelineDeals has a simple interface but deep capabilities, it is highly adaptable to a wide range of users, from the tech-savvy to the newbie.
An Interview with CEO of PipelineDeals
JP Werlin, Co-Founder & CEO of PipelineDeals
We asked JP Werlin, Co-Founder & CEO of PipelineDeals, what he thinks are the software’s unique features and how these help in real case scenarios. We also asked about his future plans for the CRM software.
What are unique features of PipelineDeals?
Werlin corroborated what we like about the software, namely, you want to get PipelineDeals for these features:
Sales acceleration toolkit
Email and app integrations
Lead management
Deal management
Custom list views
Sales goal mechanisms
These are unique to PipelineDeals in terms of combining UI simplicity with sophisticated and robust capabilities.
“PipelineDeals automates your sales process by letting your salespeople know what they should do next based on your unique sales process,” said Werlin. He also cited that PipelineDeals gives you a full picture of calls, emails, meetings, and more through activity tracking and email notifications. Unlike its competitors, Werlin said, “PipelineDeals offers a simple mechanism in the app for creating and monitoring sales goals.”
Likewise, he mentioned that deals management improves transparency with your deals. “[It] eliminates redundancy, confusion, and delays by organizing your team’s collective knowledge and providing a framework for collaborative sales.”
What are specific problems addressed by PipelineDeals?
Often, it’s the actual experience of other users that provide the best insight on how useful a product is. Werlin shared with us three actual cases how PipelineDeals has helped its clients.
Case 1: Sales development rep qualifies more leads faster
“Chris is a sales development rep that manages a large list of leads. He needs to qualify and connect with top prospects to share them with his account executives. Chris easily imports leads into PipelineDeals and sends trackable email to targeted groups of leads. Chris gets notified when a lead opens his email or downloads content that he shared, helping him to prioritize and connect with leads. He reassigns and notifies account execs about qualified leads with one click. PipelineDeals features used in solving this scenario are: trackable email, lead importing, contact management, notifications.”
Case 2: Keep the Team on the Same Page
“Jamie is a sales manager for a distributed group of inside sales executives. He runs weekly meetings with his team to identify issues in their sales pipeline and to celebrate success. Jamie creates a custom view of the team’s sales pipeline and shares this with the team in the app so that all his team members are focused around the same data. His team notifies him when they have blockers on deals, and can assign tasks to him or other members of the team to move deals forward. His sales meetings are more efficient because everyone is prepared and is focused around the same data. Pipeline features used in this problem are: shared lists, pipeline management, task management, activity tracking, shared list views.”
Case 3: Stay on top of recurring business
“Christy runs an account-based finance practice that is build on maintaining recurring contracts. She has monthly and annual contracts for different products and services that she provides. PipelineDeals automates the creation of new deals when an old contract closes. She creates to-do lists for her contracts with one click to help her stay organized and in communication with her clients. She knows if they view the content she shares and schedules next steps with clients based off of their needs. Pipeline features that cna be used in this situation are: sales process automations, trackable email, task management, deal management.”
What new features can we expect from PipelineDeals in the future?
JP Werlin shared with us that they’re launching a full email inbox integration soon. “[It] will enable users to send and receive email in PipelineDeals.” Moreover, the feature can be integrated for Google, Outlook, and other email service using IMAP. “This new feature will allows salespeople to live in PipelineDeals, as opposed to having to bounce between multiple apps.” He also mentioned releasing an integration for Quickbooks, too.
PipelineDeals SmartScore and Customer Satisfaction
Our B2B experts conducted a full review of PipelineDeals functionalities, user experience, customer support and other key elements of the service. Final results as summarized by the SmartScore system gave PipelineDeals a score of 9.7/10 while the results provided by the Customer Satisfaction Algorithm place the overall user satisfaction rating at 100%. If you want to try out the app on your own you can easily get PipelineDeals free trial here.
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